Wooster's virtual tutoring program offers educational aid to students during pandemic

Step Up is a pilot tutoring program that was launched to help students in the Los Angeles Unified School District navigate virtual learning during the pandemic. The program is only open to 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, and pairs them up with tutors if their teachers opt into the program. So far, nine schools are part of the program, representing 402 students.

To counteract learning loss imposed by the pandemic, San Antonio teachers are focusing on the most essential skills- reading and math for kindergartners through second graders. By prioritizing a specific set of skills like phonetics and arithmetic, they anticipate students will stay on track with their grade level. “We knew we had to prioritize in order to stay on grade level.” Based on their own yearly assessments, it seems the strategy is working.

The Pakistani government uses technology, like a state-owned TV channel that broadcasts content for grades 1-12 and apps sourced for free by ed-tech companies, to help the over 50 million school children without broadband internet or digital device access. The TV channel has over 54 million subscribers and there is a text-messaging service that allows its 250,000 subscribers to talk to professional teachers. Despite the digital divide, the use of educational apps has also skyrocketed since the Covid-19 pandemic. However, technology is not a silver bullet to solve the country’s deep education inequalities.

Geology professors at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire have found ways to overcome the challenges of remote learning and delivered their students a new, and all-around more accessible, virtual class experience. The two professors leading the course recorded 3D video tours and took high-definition photos for students to virtually tour the city of Hanover, and they mailed students rock kits to supplement the learning material.

When schools across New Hampshire, and the U.S., suspended in-person classes as a result of the pandemic, each developed its own way of dealing with a new teaching landscape, including Beech Street Elementary in Manchester. Instead of having teachers individually their class, the school took a "collective approach" and had teachers work as a team, with each teacher in charge of one specific lesson, to deliver the lessons to all students within the same grade. The school also accommodated ELL students by relying on a translation app, and used social media platforms to communicate with parents.

In Boston, four organizations that serve Black and Latino families formed an alliance to provide low-cost learning pods to students of color. Run out of two churches, the full-day learning pods “serve nearly two dozen kindergarten through sixth-grade students.” The service comes at a crucial time, since pandemic learning is leaving behind students of color who already were at a disadvantage.

Although the pandemic brought many difficulties to school across the globe, some institutions saw it as the time to innovate and rethink learning delivery. Cambridge High School Extension Program, "an alternative school for academically struggling students," decided to start school later in the day, schedule one-on-on sessions for students with their teachers, and distributed computers and Wi-Fi hotspots. The result has been nearly a 50% decrease in the number of chronically absent students, and an increase from 20 to 60% of students achieving honor roll.

Teachers in some California dual-language classrooms are coming up with creative ways to help students practice and learn languages during remote-only learning. Across Fresno Unified School District, teachers develop and share lessons, record videos, and have students use educational programs like Flipgrid or Seesaw so students can record themselves speaking Spanish. During some Zoom breakout groups, teachers select a fluent language speaker in the group to model pronunciation for others.

In New York City, “regional enrichment centers,” or schools for the children of essential workers, popped up. The centers provided a place where workers, who couldn’t take care of their kids when schools shut down during the pandemic, could send their children to. Nurses, administrators, and officials quickly created a network of these centers. “It was people who were willing to put themselves at risk in order to serve the city. They were just, like, ‘People need us, so we’re here.’” Fourteen thousand families registered to send their children to one of the 93 centers.

Five recently-graduated doctors put together a virtual bar-trivia-style program called SOLViT to supplement med students' curriculum during their final year, when they should be receiving in-hospital training, but can't because of the pandemic. The 90-minute sessions cover 29 topics in the students' syllabus like maternal infections and bladder cancer, is formatted to quiz the students in a true/false format, and draws from pop culture references to reinforce learning.