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In the current pandemic reality, educators can improve learning, we believe, by finding better ways to use and structure students' work time. That's true whether learning is fully remote via computers, phones, or packets or whether it includes in-person instruction.

When in-person schooling ended abruptly this spring, the learning opportunities then available to students varied enormously. Some students received no distance instruction, and others got a hodgepodge of a synchronous virtual classroom, asynchronous online activities, and worksheets and packets. Educators scrambled to keep a semblance of school going till normal returned.

The spring semester, in which schools across the country closed their doors and teachers pivoted to remote instruction on a dime, was challenging for everyone involved. But a new survey shows that teachers' sense of success dramatically declined—a troubling sign, since many schools have started the new school year remotely, too. 

But there is some good news: Teachers who had supportive school leadership were the least likely to experience a dip in their sense of success.

Engagement and equity issues need not hinder online and blended learning this school year in the same way they disrupted K-12 education when COVID shut schools down in the spring.

Six strategies administrators and their teams can take to drive quality and engagement in online and hybrid learning have been detailed in a new report, “Improving the Quality of Distance and Blended Learning,” from The Annenberg Institute at Brown University’s EdResearch for Recovery Project.

“Distance and blended learning have never been implemented at the scale they will be in the 2020-21 school year,” the report says.

Today, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University and Results for America released two new EdResearch for Recovery briefs from leading education researchers addressing important COVID-related challenges facing policymakers, educators, and parents: distance learning and supporting immigrant students during COVID-19.

The past decades of often frantic “school reform” has yielded few turnaround models that have shown positive effects for students. Often, in addition to lackluster results, they’ve left a lot of detritus in their wake: overpaid consultants, demoralized teachers, and a fragmented community.

With millions of students possibly in need of extra support to make up for last spring’s disrupted schooling, stakes are too high for approaches that won’t pay dividends for student learning.

One-on-one tutoring is the original “personalized learning,” dating back centuries. Along with the Socratic seminar, it may be among the oldest pedagogies still in existence. And as it turns out, it is probably the single most powerful strategy for responding to learning loss. 

Increasingly, top education researchers agree that tutoring programs for students who lost ground over the last six months should be a top priority for federal investment. There is potential, they say, for such a program to help ease unemployment. After all, the economic downturn means there’s a glut of talented college graduates and other degree holders who might...