Building Service-to-Educator Pipelines: Deans for Impact’s Aspiring Teachers as Tutors Network (ATTN)

Deans for Impact’s (DFI’s) vision is a transformed education system that equips teachers with the tools to create rigorous, equitable, and inclusive classrooms–so that all children thrive. DFI works with educators, leaders, and policymakers to ensure that every child is taught by a well-prepared teacher. DFI’s policy efforts aim to expand pathways into teaching that are affordable, practice-based, and focused on instructional decision-making grounded in cognitive science.

DFI has launched the Aspiring Teachers as Tutors Network (ATTN), a collaborative of 25 high-quality tutoring initiatives across 15 states. The ATTN is actively recruiting new initiatives that share its vision of increasing the number of aspiring teachers as tutors. The ATTN is working to increase the number of aspiring teachers serving as P-12 tutors and strengthen their instructional skills through meaningful clinical experiences.

The ATTN supports programs like Dallas College to navigate and influence state policies and participate in systems like the Vetted Texas Tutor Corps, which aims to support districts to achieve statutory requirements to provide supplementary instruction to any students in grades 3-8 who did not meet proficiency on the state standardized assessment. The ATTN also supports programs that are thinking deeply about how tutoring can broaden and diversify the pipeline of future teachers. For example, North Carolina A&T State University is intentionally recruiting college students enrolled in math and science degree pathways as tutors to expose more individuals to the joys of teaching.

In spring 2023, the ATTN released Mobilizing Aspiring Teachers as Tutors: Policy Solutions to Accelerate Student Learning and Strengthen Teacher Pipelines that outlines specific policy actions that state and federal leaders can take to scale and sustain successful tutoring initiatives. ATTN programs are already activating these recommendations in states across the country, such as blending federal and state sources of funding to create a sustainable future for these tutoring initiatives.

Altogether, DFI’s ATTN has engaged more than 3,500 tutors serving more than 4,500 students.

Four ATTN programs are currently testing a scalable approach to instructionally-focused tutor training. As part of the study, DFI is collecting evidence on a pre-and-post assessment as well as conducting tutor focus groups and interviews. In one interview, a tutor shared that, “something very significant I learned from Module 1 is that neglecting material will leave gaps in students’ skills and understanding and may leave students unprepared for the challenges of a later grade. I will never forget this because it is crucial to provide equitable instruction, and knowing that our instructional decisions can negatively affect our students will give me the consciousness to self-reflect.”

DFI visited 14 tutoring sites across six ATTN tutoring initiatives resulting in 9 stories of teaching and learning across a diverse breadth of programs and communities.

DFI has garnered national media attention including in the74 and The Hechinger Report.