Back to School Acceleration: To Infinity and Beyond? Or More of the Same?

By Dr. Andrew Ordover, VP of Product for the Digital Supplemental Group at McGraw Hill

A new school year approaches (or has already come, for some of us), and in many homes and classrooms, people are worried about students who have fallen behind their peers. Some may have struggled back during the COVID lockdown and never caught up; some managed the lockdown but have had trouble in the years since. “We must accelerate learning for our most vulnerable students!” people say, without quite knowing what that means or how to accomplish it. How can you accelerate students who are already having trouble driving at the current speed limit?

The Opportunity to Learn

Everything in our schools is driven by state standards and by the curriculum that a district sets in order to meet those standards. When we say that students are facing “learning loss” or “summer slide,” we’re talking about their failure to keep pace with the expectations of that curriculum. So, let’s start there.

Education researcher and many teachers’ favorite guru, Robert Marzano, in his Levels of School Effectiveness (2012), highlights “a guaranteed and viable curriculum focused on enhancing student learning” as one of five essential components of a successful school. By “guaranteed and viable,” he means that the curriculum aligns with state and district standards, yes, but also more: that all students have the opportunity to learn it; that it can be taught in the time available; and that sufficient programs are put in place to help students meet their goals.

So far, so good. Sounds lovely. And yet, let us pause for a moment while classroom teachers across the country cry in frustration.

Why? Marzano’s theory is sound. The goals are noble. It all sounds correct. But the realities of today’s classrooms make many of these things tricky.

“All students have the opportunity to learn the critical content of the curriculum.”

What does that mean, exactly? Is it simply a promise that students will be allowed into the classroom, will have sufficient time to attend lessons, and will be provided with a textbook? Is that all that “opportunity” means? If so, whose responsibility is learning loss or a summer slide?

I’ve known teachers to say things like, “It’s my job to teach; it’s their job to learn.” Is that valid? Is it fair?

What if a student lacks pre-requisite skills because of poor teaching, or earlier trauma, or poverty, or illness? Does lack of opportunity in the past have any effect on what opportunity means in the present? If so, is it the current teacher’s responsibility to make up for those early stresses and traumas? Is it even within her ability to do so? With what tools, exactly?

And what if Student X needs twice as much time as Student Z to understand a particular concept? Marzano stipulates that the curriculum “can be taught in the time available.” But can it be learned? Has Student X had the opportunity to learn if he hasn’t been given the time he needs? Or is the school only required to provide the time that the so-called “average student” needs?

This one feels more within a school’s control: some students simply need more time, so let’s give them more time. But the physical realities of time and space within a school building make that more challenging than it should be.

Our schools were built to do one thing, one way, at one pace, for students grouped by age — and the pace is set right smack in the middle of what someone has determined to be that age group’s ability to learn.

It’s possible to fight against that structure, but it’s always a fight.

A Closer Look at Averages

In his book The End of Average, Todd Rose argues that average values, like GPAs or median test scores, are of limited use because there are no real individuals who live at the perfect median point. In essence, he says, we design our entire curriculum for a phantom student who doesn’t really exist.

Individual people are “jagged” in the discrete traits that make up an average value. For example, knowing that two men each weigh 350 pounds might lead you to draw conclusions about both men…until you learn that one is over six feet tall, or that the other is a football linebacker.

In our world, knowing that three students ended the semester with a 2.8 GPA tells you very little about the journey each student took to get to that average score, and what their current level of learning and understanding might be.

If we want to accelerate their learning and boost their growth, we need to know why each student ended the year with a 2.8.

If one student earned that score consistently from September through June, but the second was doing really well until April and then, suddenly, started bombing, and the third began the year poorly and then got her act together and started doing well, no single approach will be correct for all three students.

What Makes Remediation and Acceleration Appropriate?

“Appropriate school-level and classroom-level programs and practices are in place to help students meet individual achievement goals when data indicate interventions are needed.” — Robert Marzano

Here is where the solution should lie, but “appropriate” is a tricky concept, as we just saw. Appropriate for whom, exactly, and to accomplish what? To remediate and accelerate, you need to accurately diagnose the problems your students are having, and then provide the correct remedy for each student. The more students you have, the trickier it becomes. And if you’re trying to do it while also teaching this year’s new curriculum topics…good luck.

Where do you remediate and accelerate? Do you do it in small groups as part of your regular classroom instruction (which we refer to as Tier II instruction), or in a separate room as a pull-out program (Tier III)? If it’s the latter, how do you ensure that students catching up outside of the classroom don’t miss out on essential instruction going on in the classroom with the rest of the students?

If you’re keeping all of your students together, and simply accelerating or enriching within small groups, how do you do your grouping, and what materials and assignments do you give to each group to make their time valuable? Without ongoing assessment and an expansive, adaptive library of content, it’s hard to provide “leveled” intervention resources that don’t freeze and trap students at one particular moment of time and simply reinforce where they are, rather than lifting them up and driving them forward.

Keeping Up with a Moving Target

Students are always learning and growing, and our instruction has to not only push them forward but also move to keep up with them. The key is not only to identify each student’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), but to keep them focused right in that “sweet spot” every day, pushing them gently but persistently forward as they demonstrate mastery.

“What students can do” is a moving target; we need to be able to move with it.

McGraw Hill’s Achieve3000 Literacy and ALEKS products in reading comprehension and mathematics are designed to identify that ZPD for each student and deliver exactly what each student needs — where they are, today, and where they move to, tomorrow. Each product is uniquely and scientifically designed to help students work independently, successfully, and always right at that sweet spot in reading comprehension and math.

These programs are ideal ways to help struggling students work independently to catch up, and to encourage ambitious students to go above and beyond. And because reading skills are more continuous than discrete, Achieve3000 Literacy allows you to have the entire class read and discuss the same story or article, even while students access the content at different reading levels.

There’s a lovely quote attributed to Madeline Hunter, another of our favorite education gurus (although no one seems able to find the exact source of the quote):

“Expecting all children the same age to learn from the same materials is like expecting all children the same age to wear the same size clothing.”

But it’s even worse, as anyone who has ever had small children knows: even one child can’t wear the same size clothing from month to month.

Our materials and our approaches must diagnose constantly, not just once, and our instruction must adjust constantly based on the results of those ongoing assessments.

Teaching one thing, one way, at one pace, to 20 or 30 children, is to disregard not only the “jaggedness” of any individual, but also the unique needs of each of our students.

We need assessments and resources that are flexible, responsive, adaptive, engaging, and easy to deploy. A tall order? Maybe. But we’re up to the challenge — and our students deserve our best and most innovative thinking.

Andrew Ordover, Ed.D., is Vice President of Product for the Digital Supplemental Group at McGraw Hill. Andrew started his career as a classroom teacher in English, Humanities, and Drama, working in public and private middle and high schools. Andrew has created curriculum programs for K-12 students, developed live and online professional development workshops and courses for teachers and administrators, and managed teacher onboarding and coaching for a national network of virtual schools. He has delivered keynote addresses and led workshops on topics such as concept-based curriculum, growth mindset, effective questioning techniques, and teaching for flexible thinking. Andrew has a BA in English from Emory University, an MFA in theatre from UCLA, and an Ed.D. in Administrative Leadership for Teaching and Learning from Walden University.

Marzano, R. (2012, August). Marzano Levels of School Effectiveness. www.wyoleg.gov. https://wyoleg.gov/InterimCommittee/2012/Z02MarzanoLevels.pdf

Rose, T. (2017). The end of average: How we succeed in a world that values sameness. HarperOne.