Arkansas Webinar: One-On-One Math Tutoring - LEARNS High-Impact Tutoring Vendor

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining today. I'm James from Third Space Learning, head of New schools and it's a pleasure to meet you all. We're going to run through Third Space Learning's math intervention programs, specifically looking at Arkansas and obviously the Learns act sort of high impact tutoring program which we are an approved provider of. I'll set up a test session, just show you what everything looks like in practice, partway through and then at the end we'll be able to have a question and answer period if anyone does have any sort of pressing thoughts or questions that they'd like to ask. So I'm going to share my screen to begin with and I'll start running through our presentation. So hopefully you can all see the sort of high impact one on one math tutoring for schools and districts in Arkansas slide. So as I said, we are an approved Learns high impact tutoring vendor in terms of the program. If I jump to the next slide. Here we go. We were sort of set up in order to provide expanded learning opportunities to particularly to sort of disadvantage students and those that are working below grade level. And we believe that we're a scalable and affordable solution. Schools typically will run group interventions with group size of up to about 30 students at the same time. Everything's one on one. So if there were say 30 students receiving tutoring, there would be 30 tutors at the other end. Everything's really, really personalized and differentiated. So we will ask at the start of any programs that are run for things like iready data or internal assessment data. And we will use that to put each student on an individualized learning pathway. In terms of the tutors, they are all very high quality, intensively trained. So we have a three week full time training program and all of the tutors are from STEM backgrounds. And I'll go into a bit more detail as to who the tutors are in five or 10 minutes. And it also frees up sort of staff time to focus on core sort of instruction. What a lot of schools will do is they'll run sort of small group interventions with existing class teachers and then those that they feel need additional support they can put onto the one to one program. So you can run both concurrently and particularly during the sort of existing staff shortages across the states. I think it's quite a good opportunity to really use your time wisely in terms of general efficacy. The sort of Annenberg Institute did some, some sort of testing and they found that tutoring increases achievement by up to 15 months of learning across grade levels across, across their sort of school year, which is, is obviously fantastic in terms of third space learning. As I said, we provide sort of high dosage tutoring. So I'd say typically schools will run around 90 minutes of tutoring a week and I think that correlates with the sort of academic research. So that'll either be two 45 minute sessions or three 30 minute sessions. The instructional materials are all created by US math experts, current teachers, former teachers, and they're aligned with the Arkansas mathematics standards, so really, really personalized to your state. And as I said, there's three weeks of sort of full time tutor training. Most of the tutors are from mathematics engineering tech backgrounds. So yeah, very, very competent. The tutoring that we provide is all done one on one, which is the lowest possible ratio for sort of interventions. A lot of other providers will do small group sessions so there'll be one to three, one to four, which is great. But it does mean that students still have the opportunity to sort of coast at the sort of back of the small group intervention group. Whereas when you provide one on one tutoring it means that the students don't really have anywhere to hide and they're really having to engage with the tutors and they're having to explain their answers and their reasoning, which really does accelerate progress. And the Annenberg Institute believe that lesson structure and instructional routine should be consistent. As I said, I've got a test session set up where I'll be able to show you what the sort of structure looks like in a bit more detail. But prior to the program starting, we will ask schools for their preferred days and times for the sessions for each student. So you might have one group running sessions on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at say 1:00pm you might have another group doing sessions on Tuesday and Thursday at half past three after school. So we've got tutors available from around eight in the morning through till around five PM in the evening. So you can do sessions before, during or at the end of the school day. Tutoring should take place in school with necessary equipment provided to provide equity. What we found is that when sessions take place at school you can obviously keep an eye on things like attendance and engagement. When sessions are taking place at home, we find that attendance tends to drop off quite a bit. Engagement might sort of wane slightly. Um, so by providing sessions before, during or after school, we hope that we can make it as easy as possible for, for your existing sort of paraprofessionals and math coaches and math teachers to, to manage everything and we'll provide the headsets completely free of charge. So they're fairly heavy duty over the air headsets and they have microphones coming down off them. So you'll get one of those headsets for each participant. Students typically should be grouped strategically to ensure relevant instruction. As I said, because it's all one to one, we can provide really, really personalised support. And because everything's aligned to the state standards, it should correlate very, very closely to what's being covered in the classroom. You can have groups of different grades having sessions at the same point in the year. You could even have them in the same tutorial if you wanted. We've got content from second grade all the way up to eighth grade. And as I said, typically the students that benefit most of those working either at or below grade level, that would just benefit from a little bit of extra support, sort of push them up to the expected standard as such. And in terms of student and tutor matching, obviously consistency is key. So we will ensure that the same tutors work the same students sort of week in, week out in terms of the lesson structure. I'll just give you a brief overview here and then we'll hop across to the classroom. So everything will start off with an introduction to the concept and there's a couple of warm up slides that the tutors can use to gauge whether the student has pre ops understanding of the topic. If they're struggling with the warm up questions, we introduce the concept and then we have a series of guided practice questions. So it follows an I do, we do, you do structure. The tutor will show best practice to begin with. They'll then attempt questions together and then finally there's an opportunity for independent practice for the student. So as the student progresses in their understanding, that sort of scaffolding is removed. And then towards the end of the session we will have sort of application questions. So they're assessment style questions that we can use to really gauge whether the student has a deep understanding of the concept. We will produce a post session report for each student to show you what was covered and how we feel that students got on. What I'll do now is I'll jump across to the classroom. Here we go. And I'll just show you what everything looks like in practice. So what we have to begin with are the warm up questions. Two of these calculations are correct, two are incorrect and we'll ask the student to identify the sort of calculation or the, sorry, the two calculations that they feel are, are right. And then we'll get them to explain reasoning. If they're answering those questions correctly, we'll jump past the sort of introductory slides, the introduction to the concept, and they'll move forward onto the, to the you do section of the lesson and then the sort of assessment style questions. If they are struggling, they will move into the second slide which is let's learn. So you can see there's the place value charts, it's, it's quite visual. When they're answering questions, they'll obviously have the headset and the microphone on so they'll be able to communicate verbally. And then there's also this range of tools that can be accessed. So there's a pencil function, there's the option to add lines and shapes, they can click to create text boxes. And then there's also an eraser tool as well, so they can annotate the questions and the slides using that range of tools. And we'll also be encouraging sort of verbal reasoning just to get them sort of numerically fluent. Once we move through the concept, we start the sort of follow me, which is the I do. So that's the tutor showing best practice. Your turn would be the tutor and the student working on questions together. And then on the next slide we have udo, which is obviously the opportunity for independent practice. And you can see that the place value charts have been removed, number lines have been removed and it's a bit more abstract, so more in the sort of assessment style that they'll encounter towards the end of the school year. One thing I didn't mention in the top right, where the sheep or the goat icon is, is where the tutor and the student's camera would be if the camera were to be switched on. Because we're using it for zoom right now, it's not currently available. We do encourage that the camera is switched on during the sessions just so the tutors can pick up on things like non verbal cues. But it's not essential. We can do it on either a sort of student level or at a school level. If you want to say that you want none of the students to have cameras on or all of the students to have cameras on. The next slide is the go further question. So this is the start of the application phase of the lesson. So you can see here there's two application questions and then we will move into a multiple choice question at the end which is to check your understanding. So again we're just going to ask the students to explain their reasoning and then they're graded across the you do phase of the lesson. The sort of the go further slide here and also the check your understanding slide. And then you will receive a sort of an aggregated score based on whether they answered questions independently, whether they answer questions with lots of help, or whether they answer questions with a little bit of help. So you should get quite a clear picture of how everyone's progressing, whether the content is pitched at the right level, if the student's struggling. At any point within the session, there are two support slides that can be accessed. So there's the let's explore this more, which is just a place value chart or 3 place value charts to sort of really reinforce the student's understanding. And then on the next slide, if they feel it's necessary, the tutors can bring up a blank place value chart in the let's explore this more slide. So those final two slides don't have to be used, but if a student is struggling with their conceptual understanding, the tutor can bring it up. Just to make everything slightly clearer, if we go back to the summary document, I'll just continue working through. So, as I said, the students that typically will benefit most from the tutoring will be those that are working either at or below grade level. It might be those sort of, I guess, Title 1 eligible students that are sort of economically disadvantaged, those that need a bit of additional support prior to state tests. I know that the ESSA Covid relief funding expires this year. It needs to be committed by the end of the school year. But if you still have students that are suffering from learning loss post Covid, they might be sensible students to target. And also those that lack confidence and engagement in class. As I said, because they are encountering that sort of one on one support, we can really bring them out of their shell in a way that maybe small group tutoring or just sort of conventional classroom teaching might not be able to. On the next slide, we have just a sort of a brief description of the classroom. As I said, I've shown you what that looks like in practice. But we will encourage students to verbalise their reasoning because it's quite a low stakes environment. It can help students to explore their misconceptions and get to grips with concepts in greater depth. And if you do have low confidence students, maybe switching the camera off might be sensible so they can just hear the tutors without being able to see them, which might take a little bit of pressure off. And then, yeah, the students will draw and type on the Shared essence slides just to show their show they're working. You've got a quote at the bottom there from Michelle Craig, who's an instructional coach at Sherwood Forest Elementary School. She said, we just had our first session, it went great. The kids really liked it and they felt that they felt like they were learning. And one said that he finally felt like math was making sense, which is obviously the sort of aim of all of this. In terms of the reporting, you will get both an in platform report as well as an end of programme report. So the in platform report will show you things like the topics that were covered. There'll be comments from the tutors, which will just enable you to work out on a sort of anecdotal level, whether the content is at the right level, whether they feel that the students are engaging, misbehaving or not. And then the screenshot just at the top there on the right is an example of the end of program report. So we will show you average attendance, the rate of learning objective completion per session. So I showed you the seven slides within the classroom. Having a LO completion rate of 1.5 would mean that they completed one and a half lesson packs within one tutorial. You'll be able to see the average session rating. So the students will grade the session at the end of each tutorial. So you'll be able to see the average score out of five. The tutors will mark whether they feel students were engaged or unengaged. So in this instance you can see that Ellie Williams had a 12% unengagement rate, which is still relatively low. But if that number starts creeping up, then we can work out whether we feel that the program is appropriate for individual students or not. You'll be able to see lateness. Obviously, if students are turning up to sessions, sort of 10, 15 minutes into the. Into the session, and the session lasts half an hour in length, you're missing quite a substantial period of potential learning time. So I think promptness is quite critical to an effective intervention. And then you'll also be able to see the performance score as well. So, as I said, we grade students on the UDO phase of lesson and then the application questions. So you'll be able to see whether they're answering questions independently, which would be a score of 100%, or whether they're answering questions with lots of help, which would be a slightly lower score, sort of down towards, say, 50%. In terms of the tutors, the tutors are all based globally, so they're primarily based in India and Sri Lanka. We have trained just under 5,000 tutors in our 10 plus years of operating, and we have now taught over 2 million individual sessions, which is fantastic. The tutors are all subject to English language tests, police clearance checks and also FBI fingerprinting checks as part of their initial assessment. And then as I said, they have the three week full time training program which will cover things like tutoring, best practice, special educational needs. They'll have ongoing training and coaching development from the quality assurance team as well. And the framework that we have used to develop the sort of tutor training and coaching modules was developed in partnership with the Institute of Education. The CPD was designed by a team of former UK Mass specialist teachers as well. And they make up the quality assurance team or they oversee the quality assurance team. And then yeah, the training sort of focuses on effective one on one math instruction through student centered teaching. Again, a quote at the bottom from Shipper Clawson at Frontier Middle School who said that it's excellent. Students were very engaged and they liked it. I believe the feeling of liking it comes from feeling successful. I listened in on some of the student sessions. The tutors were excellent and the students conceptual understanding was improving. So I think as well as developing an understanding of particular concepts and of the subject itself, developing that growth, mindset and that enjoyment of learning is also critical. In terms of the sort of institutions who have given us approval, obviously the Arkansas Department of Education have approved us as part of the high impact tutoring pilot program. We're also approved in Texas to provide TEKS aligned tutoring, New York as part of the Next generation Mathematical Learning Standards and Ohio just as some of the examples of states where we have approval. And then in terms of impact, as I said, we have delivered over 2 million sessions to around 160,000 students across just over 4,000 schools. 90% of students who have participated show a solid foundational understanding of the concept that they've been learning. Post session, 88% of students rate their lessons four plus out of five for usefulness and enjoyment. 70% of students who reported low confidence in the initial assessment that students will take said that they found that their confidence had improved by the end of the program. And then 100% of teachers said that we help their students achieve higher test scores. In the most recent round of assessments, which is brilliant in terms of I guess an independent pilot program. We found that students that had one 45 minute session a week across 14 sessions made seven months of math growth. So that was around double progress. So that's quite a good benchmark for what we'd expect to see. Can't guarantee that, but I think that gives you Quite a good idea of what we feel a successful programme would look like. We move into the costs of the program. So we are one of the cheaper sort of one on one math tutoring providers. You've got an example cost in the bottom right corner there. So if you had 10 students having three 30 minute sessions a week for 14 weeks, it would be $18 per student per session, which would be $54 per student per week across the entire program. That would be a total cost of $756 per student, which would be $7,560 across the. Across the entire program. If you were to scale that up to 25 students, it would be the same cost per student per session which would equate to a total cost of £18,900. Sorry, $18,900 across the 14 week block. I do have a pricing calculator here that can be shared if people are interested in the cost of the program. So you can customize things like the session length, the number of sessions per week, the total number of students participating, the total number of weeks, and that will give you the costs per session as well as the total cost. And then obviously for reporting purposes, you'll be able to see the total number of sessions as well. So I can share that with anyone that's interested. And then in terms of setup, it's very, very straightforward. It takes around a week or two to get going. We will get you an individual student profile as well as individual staff profiles for any participants. As I said, if you want to provide us with things like iready assessment data or internal diagnostic data prior to the session starting, we can map those against our sort of learning objectives and our lesson plans. We can put students on individualized learning pathways. If you just want us to focus on broad areas of the curriculum. So you might want to do an algebra program or a place value program, that's also fine. Just let us know for each student or each group of students, potentially each grade. Prior to the first session, we'll do a short training call which will last about 15 minutes for any staff members that might be overseeing the program. We can also do some technical tests just to make sure that things like firewalls aren't blocking the audio ports and the video ports. We provide the microphones and the headsets completely free of charge. We will have a sort of three week check in after the first couple of rounds of sessions just to make sure that you're finding everything is running smoothly and the students are enjoying everything. And you will have a dedicated account manager as well. In terms of sort of start dates of the program, we do offer a summer school for those that run summer school programs. Most schools, I think, are looking to start in around October time. So you've got that opportunity at the start of the school year to sort of assess students and to work out those that would benefit from the program. And then. Yeah, schools will typically run sessions between October and the week of the sort of state assessments. But there's no minimum, no maximum number of weeks. There's no minimum, maximum number of students here. So if you wanted to target one student for 10 weeks, that's fine. If you wanted to target 100 students for 30 weeks, equally completely. Okay. Our telephone number is 929-298-4593. And if you want to email us, it's helloirdspacelearning.com I will stop sharing there. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to send them across and I'll get back to you via email. But if not, thank you very much for attending. I hope that you found it useful and look forward to potentially working together soon. Thank you.