Selecting a Tutoring Approach: Partner with a Provider, Grow Your Own Program or Hybrid?

Overview: What are the different tutoring approaches?

Once you have set clear goals for your tutoring program, you need to determine how your district will approach the day-to-day implementation of High-Impact Tutoring. Three approaches are common:

Partnering with a Provider

Working with a provider means outsourcing the majority of the design and implementation of the tutoring program. Providers take responsibility for recruitment, hiring, and ongoing training for tutors, as well as managing a large part of data collection and continuous program improvement. Your role at the district will be to collaborate with the provider to ensure smooth program integration into the district’s already-established systems.

Growing Your Own Program

Instead of contracting with an outside organization to provide tutoring services, you may opt to build a new program from the ground up, leveraging your district’s existing systems and the talent pool in your community. This approach means taking ownership of recruitment, hiring, training, data collection, and program improvement yourself. It provides greater control over the fine-grain details of design and implementation, but entails substantially greater responsibility.

Hybrid Approach

Some tutoring providers offer the option of contracting with them to provide technical assistance with some, but not all, aspects of designing and implementing High-Impact Tutoring. For example, this technical assistance could involve giving you access to the organization’s tutoring curriculum and training materials or providing direct coaching on implementing their model, while the District maintains responsibility for recruiting and selecting tutors.

Which approach should you take?

For many districts, partnering with a provider is a good option. Partnering with an established provider allows your District to more quickly adopt an already proven model with an experienced partner. This option is particularly appropriate if your District has limited capacity to develop and implement new programs.

For other districts, developing their own program is a better choice. Growing your own program is a good choice If your district uses High-Quality Instructional Materials, has educator and administrative capacity and interest in developing a High-Impact Tutoring program and does not have access to a strong pool of existing providers with which to partner.

Use the assessment at the start of Section 3B: Grow Your Own Program to better understand whether this approach is a good option for your district.