Education Week - October 4, 2023 - 9

able and more enthusiastic about engaging in
discussions, " said Amy Pasquarello, Gloucester's
assistant superintendent. " They're raising their
hand, they're participating, because they have
that background knowledge that they may not
have had before. "
What Tibbetts has been doing since she
started in the district two years ago is considered
a best practice for English-learner instruction.
Some might just call it good teaching. But the
Gloucester district sees her work as a key part
of a new instructional strategy for all students,
Pasquarello said: learning acceleration.
What is learning acceleration?
Starting in the spring and summer of 2020,
education organizations started to promote
the idea of acceleration as a pandemicrecovery
strategy, a way to close learning gaps
that arose from school disruptions and the
challenges of remote learning.
The idea was that teachers would give all
students grade-level work, even if they missed
key understandings or knowledge from
previous grades when in-person classes shut
down in the pandemic. Teachers would build
in support in their grade-level instruction that
could help students access the material-like
Tibbetts did for her English-learner students.
Despite the buzz around acceleration,
federal data show that it hasn't proved to be as
popular as other learning-recovery strategies.
A 2022 survey from the National Center for
Education Statistics' School Pulse Panel found
that 72 percent of schools were using remedial
instruction, 56 percent were using highdosage
tutoring, and 39 percent were using
acceleration.
Experts have long said that doing acceleration
well is challenging: It requires unified academic
goals at the district level, resources that can help
teachers add scaffolds to their lessons, time
for teachers to plan, and ongoing professional
learning. And it also can seem at odds with
a commonly held education maxim-that
teachers should meet each student where they
are and differentiate instruction to their level.
" The folks that are engaged in this change
process, it's a multiyear effort, " said Elizabeth
Chu, the executive director of the Center for
Public Research and Leadership at Columbia
University, who has studied teaching and
learning during the pandemic.
Leaders in districts that started this work over
the past few years agree. Building this kind of
systemwide shift in instructional approach is at
least a five-year journey, said Gary Willow, the
assistant superintendent for curriculum and
instruction in the Washington County public
schools, in Maryland. He sees his district's
acceleration effort as an initiative with a
*Results show responses from teachers.
SOURCE: EdWeek Research Center
survey, July 2023
Take the example of a 4th grade class learning
to add fractions. The teacher would first
determine if students had unfinished learning
around fractions from 3rd grade-did they
understand that a fraction is a part of a whole
number? If not, the teacher would weave that
instruction into her 4th grade lesson, so that
students would be better prepared to take on
the grade-level work, rather than spending the
whole lesson time reteaching the 3rd grade skill.
It's hard to know how common this approach
is, either in individual teachers' classrooms
or as a districtwide strategy, because surveys
asking about " acceleration " might not capture
everyone who is teaching this way, said Sarah
Johnson, the CEO of Teaching Lab, a teacher
professional learning organization.
" This jargon of acceleration is a pandemicera
jargon, " she said. " I think that most of
the time, teachers don't use the jargon of
acceleration, but they might be engaged in the
process of acceleration. "
In a 2023 EdWeek Research Center survey,
only 14 percent of educators said that their
districts or schools provided additional resources
for accelerated learning to help students master
said. " It holds that tier 1 instruction is sacred. "
This year, the district plans to create
structures that will bring the kind of scaffolding
Tibbetts is doing in her classroom systemwide,
says Pasquarello.
The elementary teacher is excited to see more
formalized systems for this work across the
district, but she also worries about workload-
especially for EL and special education teachers.
Tibbetts spends two to three hours of her own
time every other day preparing the materials
she needs to preteach vocabulary and content
knowledge, she said.
" I do it because I love my kids and I think
that's what they need, but I know that's not the
fairest of routes, " Tibbetts said, referencing
asking other teachers to take on that kind of extra
workload. " There's just some logistical stuff
that's going to be tough to figure out. "
Putting the 'grunt work' on district
leadership
Shifting some of these logistics off teachers
and onto other district personnel was
essential to making acceleration work in
LEARNING RECOVERY: GETTING IT TO WORK | 9
broader goal than just pandemic recovery.
" Our goal is not to get back to where we
were, " Willow said. " Our goal is to go beyond
where we were before. "
How common is acceleration?
Before COVID, the word " acceleration "
often referred to gifted education-giving
advanced students above-grade-level content,
or teaching them at a faster pace.
But the " acceleration " of the pandemic era has
a different definition. It's designed to be used with
all students, not just those who are advanced.
And the goal isn't to move at a faster pace but to
remove barriers that would prevent students from
understanding grade-level content.
NATIONAL SURVEY DATA
Which of the following best describes the approach you plan to use during the 202324
school year to address pandemic-related unfinished learning/learning loss?
material they missed during the pandemic.
But when asked to pick the description that
best encapsulated their instructional approach,
the majority of teachers selected the choice that
described acceleration. (See chart, this page.).
This disconnect makes sense to Pasquarello,
in Gloucester. " I don't think what we're doing
we're calling acceleration, but we are, " she said.
Making sure kids have equal access to strong
instruction is always important, she said, " but
now more than ever. "
Last year, the district altered school schedules
to create a separate block for intervention and
special services, outside of time for whole-class,
or what the district calls " tier 1 " , instruction.
" That makes sure that students are not pulled for
extra services during the tier 1 block, " Pasquarello
Education Week - October 4, 2023

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