More Ed Schools Join the Movement
Twenty-seven other educator-prep programs and nonprofits, along with Bowling Green, joined the Aspiring Teachers As Tutors Network launched in 2023 by the national nonprofit Deans for Impact. The members of this collaborative are all working to get more pre-service teachers serving as tutors.
EduTutorVA, one of the nonprofit partners, places college students as virtual tutors in Virginia public schools. The students all attend postsecondary institutions in Virginia, with the current cohort of 150 tutors representing 14 different institutions, from community colleges to the flagship state university. About 20 percent of this year’s tutors are education majors, but EduTutorVA executive director Meredith Fortner hopes that share will increase as more education-school deans recognize the value of tutoring as pre-service field experience.
Willis Walter, dean of Virginia State University’s education school, is one of those deans. Several VSU education students are working this year as EduTutorVA tutors in Richmond Public Schools, and Walter is pushing his school in the direction of Bowling Green, hoping to make tutoring a degree requirement. He is also leading a conversation among other Virginia education-school deans about what role tutoring should play in teacher training.
“Simply observing in classrooms doesn’t do too much for our students,” Walter shared. “The next step is for them to tutor and connect with children in that way. It also helps them understand how today’s students might be different from them, or that the way these students are growing up is different than their own childhood.”
Walter says that his VSU students enjoy tutoring. “They all want to be part of people’s lives and want to help students. That’s why many of them got into education in the first place.” Making tutoring a formal part of teacher preparation achieves two goals, according to Walter. “Yes, I want tutoring to be more of a teaching tool in the process of developing teachers,” he said, “but I also want our state legislators and delegates to understand the process of developing educators. The more we can get them to understand the process, the skills, the more they understand just what it means to be a classroom teacher.” Like Shinew in Ohio, Walter wants his students to fully understand what teaching entails before they commit to a classroom position.
Fortner would love the Virginia Department of Education to either require or strongly recommend tutoring as a pre-service placement. Her organization, which pays tutors $20 to $30 per hour and has waitlists of both qualified college students and public schools hoping to get tutors, would welcome the support of apprenticeship and workforce dollars. Right now, schools pay nothing. The annual cost of approximately $1,300 per student for 60 tutoring sessions is covered by EduTutorVA through its philanthropic fundraising.
At William Ramsay Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia, Principal Michael Routhouska says the tutoring has had a real impact. Last year, the students who received tutoring jumped from 28 percent proficient to 70 percent proficient on the state reading assessment. The tutors are Black, Latino, Asian, and white, just like the highly diverse student population at Ramsay.
Unlike the Bowling Green students, these tutors may not be enrolled in a course offering explicit support, but they do work with a coach provided by EduTutorVA. The coach engages with all of the tutors assigned to a given school, observing multiple tutoring sessions and providing feedback.
“The tutors are so open to feedback,” said coach Brenda Tarquinio, a former Alexandria City Public Schools teacher. “I’ve never had a single one push back on anything I share, and they often tell me how helpful this is. They really want to do a good job.” Fortner says several tutors have shared with her that they are switching their majors to education after spending the year tutoring.
College students provide a natural source of tutors, and the supply could grow dramatically if more schools of education were to adopt Bowling Green’s approach, building a semester or more of high-impact tutoring into the aspiring teacher’s course of study. Ed schools could also build on EduTutorVA’s approach to create meaningful virtual tutoring opportunities. If one-quarter of the nation’s teacher-education students worked as tutors each year, tutoring three groups of students three times a week (devoting about six hours a week, including planning time), about one million U.S. students could experience high-impact tutoring, and many future teachers would gain the skills and confidence to serve effectively—a win for students, teachers, and the nation. Other organizations, including Teach for America, are also using college students as tutors. Its TFA Ignite Fellowship pays college students a stipend to tutor a small group of students four days a week in 30-minute sessions for 10 weeks. More than 2,200 college students have served as TFA Ignite Fellows since 2020, and a growing number of them join the TFA Corps as teachers after graduation.
If we want tomorrow’s teachers prepared to make the most of sound curricula, appropriately leverage rapidly evolving technology, and understand the needs of 21st-century students, asking them to spend time engaging in the very practices that might yield dramatic results for students, like tutoring, is perhaps just common sense. And perhaps this innovation presents an opportunity to finally reimagine education schools and the preparation of America’s teachers.
