Catching Up Secondary Students: High-Impact, Extra-Time Intervention

This post is part of a four-part series on Best Practices for Addressing Pandemic Learning Loss & Reengaging Students at Secondary Schools, sharing best practice strategies that can make a big difference for secondary students’ learning and engagement: dedicated time for relationship building, extra-time intervention, incorporating voice and choice, and scheduling strategically.

Daily, extra-time intervention is needed to help kids catch up, and stay caught up

Throughout middle school and high school, content becomes increasingly complex and continues to build off prior learning. Even before the pandemic, too many students started the school year with skill gaps. After two years of disrupted learning, the number of students who are struggling academically has only increased. Plus, even among those students who start off the year caught up, regular core instruction class time will simply not be enough time for some students to master the important current-year skills and content necessary to be successful. This is especially true for knowledge and skills in foundational subjects like math, reading, and writing, which are necessary for nearly every other type of course at every grade level.

Best practice research provides a clear and compelling roadmap for how to catch kids up and help them stay caught-up: students who struggle academically need effective core instruction, plus daily extra time to learn from a content-strong teacher. The research is clear: students care more about school when at least one adult at school cares about them. Students who feel connected to their school and teachers are also more likely to have higher academic achievement, have better school attendance, and stay in school longer. And while few kids look back as an adult and say, “Art 7 really changed my life!”, many more will say their art teacher made a lasting impression. Often, what makes a student like a class is the teacher’s personalized attention and their relationship more than the subject matter.

What high-impact intervention looks like at the secondary level

In addition to being delivered as daily extra time, secondary intervention should incorporate the following best practices to be truly high-impact:

• Only students who need extra help should get extra help

  It is unfair and inequitable to have students who don’t struggle to waste a period a day on a class they don’t need.

• Extra help is delivered by a content-strong teacher

  The most impactful intervention comes from direct instruction delivered by a teacher who knows the material inside and out, not a software-based intervention program. Teachers with deep subject-matter expertise can supercharge learning. They’ll reteach concepts not yet mastered, teach such concepts in new and multiple ways, deduce underlying misconceptions, and target instruction to unteach the incorrect approach.

• Focus on foundational skills, in particular literacy, writing, and math

  Some skills are foundational. Prioritize mastery of reading, writing, or math when it comes to intervention, not because of state tests but because students who struggle in these subjects will struggle all through middle school, high school, and often after graduation as well. Giving up a semester of foreign language or an elective is a small price to pay for a lifetime of benefit.

• Focus on one subject, not two or more

  It’s better to go deep than wide. Schools that have dramatically closed the achievement gap allow students to concentrate on catching up in just one subject for at least half a year, rather than trying to address multiple subjects at once. This allows enough time to achieve meaningful growth, which greatly increases student motivation.

• Create content-specific, credit-bearing intervention courses

  The best way to provide extra-time intervention from content-strong staff at the secondary level is through the creation of extra-time, content-specific intervention courses that are built into student and teacher schedules. This is otherwise known as a “double-time” model. Adding a course code and credit to an intervention course helps gives it the necessary “weight” for it to be respected by both students and staff. It makes it clear that it should be taken as seriously as any other course.

Scheduling extra-time intervention: Guidance for middle and high schools

With a strategic approach to scheduling, middle schools and high schools can incorporate daily high-impact, extra-time intervention to ensure that students who need extra help get the help they need, demonstrating a commitment to both equity and to excellence. The best practices for intervention don’t require abandoning existing middle school and high school models, but they do require scheduling a little differently.

• Middle Schools

  Middle schools need to schedule targeted literacy, writing, and math intervention courses, as explained above, to close the achievement gap and accelerate learning. Doing so requires making changes in approach to scheduling and to staffing.

  Many middle schools embrace grade-level teaching teams consisting of a math, an ELA, a science, and a social studies teacher, which means there is an equal number of each type of teacher and they each teach an equal number of periods a day. The result is that no core teacher is available to teach a content-specific intervention course, such as math intervention.

  Two changes in approach can make scheduling and staffing best-practice intervention possible. In schools that use a team approach to staffing, more than one math teacher, for example, is assigned to each team—one to teach core instruction and another to teach intervention classes. Often, the intervention math teacher is part of more than one team. Schools that have departmentalized staffing assign math and ELA teachers to also teach an intervention class each day beyond their core classes. In the name of fairness, the science and social studies teacher might be asked to teach an elective like forensics or the history of technology.

• High Schools

  As content continues to grow more complex in high school, kids who struggle academically can struggle for different reasons and will need highly targeted support to address their needs. For example, 9th graders who struggle in math may struggle either because they did not master 8th grade concepts, or they may struggle because of a lack of understanding of more fundamental concepts like number value and fractions. Both groups need extra-time intervention, but they are unlikely to benefit from the same course. Creating courses based on the level and types of student needs will make intervention much more impactful at the high-school level.

  Finally, when scheduling, aim to prioritize intervention during 9th and 10th grade by delaying subjects that do not require four credits for graduation. For example, if only two years of foreign language are needed, delay scheduling Spanish until 10th or 11th grade. This helps ensure students master foundational content that sets them up for success in later years.

Daily extra time to learn is critical to helping students who struggle at the secondary level catch up and stay caught up academically. To maximize the impact of extra-time intervention, ensure it is taught by content-strong teachers, focuses on foundational skills including literacy, writing, and math, allows students to concentrate on catching up in a single subject at a time, and the content-specific intervention courses bear credit the same way any other course would. Shifting to a more strategic approach to scheduling makes it possible to incorporate best-practice intervention at both middle and high schools and ensure students get the help they need.