-
Click here to read the full articleNovember 18, 2024
By Mandy McLaren, Boston Globe
CHELSEA, Mass. -- Try as she might, first-grade teacher Kyle McGee can’t be everywhere at once. She can’t practice high-frequency words with Jonathan and at the same time attend to Santino’s reading fluency. She can’t rehearse short vowels with Raelynn while also quizzing Sophia on letter sounds or Joel on the Magic E rule.
But this is what her students need: individualized attention.
All 25 of them.
Therein lies the challenge of modern teaching, especially in a post-pandemic world, where foundational deficits, if not addressed early and aggressively, can hamstring students for life. So what’s McGee to do?
As a teacher in the Chelsea Public Schools, she has been able to deploy a superpower of sorts, relying on an army of trained reading tutors to provide tailored, one-on-one instruction to more than half of her students for 15 minutes every school day. The tutors, employed by Ignite Reading, a San Francisco-based company, beam in through interactive video calls on students’ laptops.
Chelsea’s experiment, which the district began during the 2023-24 school year, is an example of “high-dosage” tutoring, a research-backed practice requiring small groupings and highly trained tutors, and which experts nationally say is key to pandemic recovery.
What’s more, the model could prove a salve for a longstanding literacy problem in the state: Even before the pandemic, more than one in three Massachusetts third-graders weren’t meeting state expectations for English language arts, MCAS data show.
