Education Week - April 6, 2022 - 16

Instructional leaders
should put the focus on
rigorous content with
teachers addressing
learning gaps as needed
within the context of
grade-level work.
Tutoring Is Not the Best Path
To Learning Recovery
By Raymond C. Hart
A
ddressing unfinished learning has
become a major focus of instructional
planning and resource allocation in
school systems across the country.
Although the scale of the pandemicrelated
challenge may be novel,
unfinished learning is nothing new.
Addressing skill gaps, incomplete learning, or learning loss
after a hiatus in instruction, such as summer break, is a longstanding
challenge-and one with which educators have
traditionally struggled.
School systems across the country are pursuing a variety of
strategies for academic recovery. Some of these approaches
appear promising, with ample emphasis on acceleration over
remediation, building a district's instructional capacity, and
providing social and emotional learning opportunities to meet
the full range of students' needs. At the Council of Great City
Schools, we've also observed districts that in their rush to " fix
the problem " of unfinished learning are choosing approaches
that may very well contribute to disparities in academic
achievement and opportunity.
What should instructional leaders in schools and districts do
to effectively address unfinished learning and meet both the
short- and long-term needs of students? We recommend the
following strategies.
1. Clearly define the problem to implement the right
solutions.
When unfinished learning is defined as a learning
deficiency, educators are quick to respond with remediation or
pullout interventions that isolate students and keep them from
rigorous, engaging, grade-level content. Instructional leaders
can help classroom teachers define the problem differently.
When we take a moment to identify the root causes of our
current tidal wave of unfinished learning, we see that students
are struggling with gaps in skills and knowledge because of
the pandemic.
The priority should thus be on equipping teachers with the
skills and resources to address this lack of instruction. An
overreliance on low-quality tutoring or other instructional
16 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 6, 2022 | www.edweek.org/opinion
tactics in which expectations for students are low runs the risk
of exacerbating the problem rather than addressing it.
2. Stick to grade-level content and instructional rigor
and ensure the inclusion of every learner.
How should educators address unfinished learning if not
through reteaching and remediation? Instructional leaders
should put the focus on rigorous content with teachers
addressing learning gaps as needed within the context of
grade-level work.
Teachers can encourage " productive struggle " with gradelevel
material by, in part, allowing students sufficient time to
make sense of texts, tasks, or problems before intervening.
Some students need more intensified instruction to address
skill deficits, but these additional layers of support should not
come at the cost of core-content instruction.
The daily reengagement of prior knowledge in the context
of grade-level assignments will add up over time. It will result
in more functional learning than if teachers resort to watereddown
instruction or try to reteach topics out of context or below
grade level.
3. Focus on the depth of instruction, not on the pace.
Districts should avoid the temptation to rush to cover all
gaps in learning from the pandemic. The pace required to
cover all this content will mean speeding ahead of many
students, leaving them feeling abandoned and discouraged.
It will also feed students a steady diet of curricular junk food:
shallow engagement with the content, low standards for
understanding, and low cognitive demand.
As educators, we need to remain focused on the learning
that should be happening today, providing just-in-time rather
than just-in-case teaching. " Just-in-case " wastes time teaching
content and skills from earlier grades in case students need it
for grade-level work. " Just-in-time " concentrates on needs that
actually occur during grade-level work. When teachers take the
time to provide patient, in-depth instruction in new content,
the signs of unfinished learning arise naturally, and teachers
can address them.
4. Identify priority content and learning.
To help teachers find the time for in-depth instruction and justin-time
learning, curriculum leaders need to articulate what is
most important to teach for each subject and grade. Prioritizing
learning does not mean that students will be deprived of critical
knowledge or a rich learning environment. Just because a topic
is important doesn't make every underlying or related skill or
concept vital to a student's ultimate understanding of that topic.
Prioritization gives students the time they need to work through
challenges and teachers the time they need to provide feedback.
5. Identify and address gaps in learning through
instruction, avoiding the misuse of standardized
testing.
Instructional leaders also need to ensure that assessment
data are not misinterpreted or misused by teachers or
administrators. While assessment companies tend to market
their adaptive assessments as providing " diagnostic "
information for every child, what the assessments are more
often designed to do is measure growth over time so that trends
among student demographic groups can be monitored.
Teachers and administrators can confuse standardized-test
results with a student's capacity to learn. Consequently, they
place kids into high- or low-ability groups or relegate lowerperforming
students to easier work. That is not an appropriate
use of assessment data, nor is it an effective strategy for
addressing unfinished learning.
The success of Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden's
nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court and a graduate of a public
high school in Miami, shows that children from big-city
districts can achieve at the highest levels. But for education
to be both equitable and effective, schools must offer strong,
grade-level instruction. Only that choice fully honors the
potential of all our students.
HART is the executive director of the Council of the Great
City Schools. He has more than 30 years of experience in
research and evaluation and was previously the director of
research for the council.
Kudryavtsev Pavel /Getty
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Education Week - April 6, 2022

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