Chris Norwood, the founding director of the Bay Area Tutoring Association, highlights the impact of tutors, parents, students, community members and business leaders collaborating to invest in the future. He explores the preparation of tutors and the rewards for tutors, students, and the community. Consider what can be accomplished through the development of an academic tutoring workforce, extended learning programs and services. Possibilities!!

Visit the Bay Area Tutoring Association website here.

Email Chris: chris.norwood@bayareatutor.org

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.000] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.

[00:00:26.980] – Steve
Learning and growing with tutoring. Joining our podcast today is Chris Norwood, the founding director of the Bay Area Tutoring Association. Chris is a San Francisco Bay Area native, a former technologist, school board member, and a recognized thought leader in California public education, governance and policy implementation. The Bay Area Tutoring Association is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit comprised of a growing network of educational professionals, tutors, parents, volunteers, community members, grassroots organizations, business leaders, and corporate retirees. These contributors donate time, talent, and treasure to the future academic success of Bay Area homeless, foster, at risk, and justice-engaged youth. Chris and I had an earlier conversation to get acquainted before the podcast, and I’m extremely excited to have him share his knowledge, enthusiasm, and his commitment with our listeners. Welcome, Chris.

[00:01:41.740] – Chris
Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

[00:01:44.960] – Steve
Thanks so much for joining us. When we spoke earlier, you talked about having very young experiences in tutoring that have impacted you. I’m wondering if you’d start us with those those stories?

[00:02:01.820] – Chris
Sure. Thank you very much again for the opportunity. I began tutoring even before I knew what tutoring was. I was reading at three or four years old, strong in math and puzzles and reading. And by elementary school, kindergarten, I was helping my classmates who were struggling. The story I commonly tell is that one day it was recess time, I’m going out to recess, my friends are still in the classroom because they weren’t able to finish their assignments. I stayed in. I began to support them on finishing their assignments. They finished. We were able to go out to play. I was happy, the teacher was happy, my friends were happy and thus this lifelong passion and appreciation for tutoring began. I’d say what I discovered early on is that tutoring doesn’t just help the learner, but it also has been transformational for me. Teaching someone else or tutoring someone else deepens my own understanding, helped me build confidence and develop a deep sense of empathy for those that learn differently from me. Growing up in East Oakland and the Sunny Hills community of Milpitas, I did see how access gaps affected students differently. Academic skills gave me opportunity, privilege, and tutoring taught me responsibility.

[00:03:17.980] – Chris
It showed me that knowledge is a power only when it’s shared. That experience shaped my life and what’s brought me here today.

[00:03:24.920] – Steve
When you first shared that with me, what was going through my head, I’m the oldest of four kids. I have three younger sisters, and they all got tortured having to play school on any day that we had. [laughter] I was the teacher pulling out these old textbooks that my parents had and giving my sister’s assignments in it. I’m sure they all look back on me working in education for 50 years now, and I guess that it clicked, started in all the way back then.

[00:04:02.460] – Chris
Yeah, I get that. The same with my sister. I’m the oldest, and my sister learned to read very early as well because I would practice with her, and we really enjoyed it. And it both established our love for reading and academics.

[00:04:19.500] – Steve
So fill us in on the Bay Area Tutoring Association and how you work with students’ families and your partners.

[00:04:28.260] – Chris
Sure. So the mission Bay Area Tutoring Association is really focused on the academic tutoring workforce. It’s the development of the tutors because tutors are leaders, tutors are empathetic, tutors have subject matter expertise. So we really are working on cultivating that workforce. And with that cultivation of that workforce, we turn it towards areas of need, opportunity, and equity. So for example, you have mentioned foster youth, homeless education, at risk, socioeconomically disadvantaged and justice-engaged youth. One of the reasons that justice-engaged youth actually occurs is because of their disconnect from education. And for those that are in homeless or foster situations, one of the ways that they’re going to be able to get out of that is having an education. We really see this academic tutoring workforce, training it, developing it, and then turning it towards some of the challenges that we have in society today. When I think about the work that we do, we operate inside school systems and with social service agencies, not outside of them. We partner. We look to align with classroom instruction in some of the technical terminology like the MTSS frameworks and the overall school district goals. The other piece is that we get a chance to partner with principals and teachers and superintendents and community leaders and other elected officials explaining the value of what tutoring can bring to an economy or local society.

[00:06:01.600] – Chris
In those areas, we’re really excited about the work that we’re doing as Bay Area Tutoring Association, the only association on the West Coast or in the Western hemisphere of the United States. As the tutoring movement continues to grow, we’re just looking forward to help others and other organizations figure out how to provide the best services that they can in whatever country or city they may reside.

[00:06:23.860] – Steve
I see the word tutoring show up rather frequently in emails that that give a list of articles to read. It seems that it’s just there rather frequently. I’m wondering, what’s the research saying about tutoring and the effectiveness of tutoring? And is the research being done outside the US? This podcast has a lot of listeners from international schools as well as in the States.

[00:06:57.860] – Chris
My goodness. The research on tutoring now is just continuing to grow. UNESCO is doing some work around their Sustainable Development Goal Number 4. There was a community of practice that I was invited to by the Australian Tutoring Association that was really talking about what the privatization of tutoring has done to public education. And then in the States, the Stanford National Student Support Accelerator, Johns Hopkins University, the Proven Tutoring Organization, they’re all really looking at what is the research and evidence about tutoring working. And one of the things that we’re focused on now, and particularly in the States, is what they call high impact tutoring. And the high impact tutoring – the national research talks about each individual student gets at least 2-3 times per week, either in one on one or a small group. Small group maximum is three to five, and they’re getting 30 minutes to 45 minutes per session. It’s in line with the classroom instruction, and they’re using data not only to assess, but to iterate over the time with the tutoring session. It involves some technology, but it’s also involved in the quality of the relationship between the tutor and the tutee, because tutoring is really relationship-based.

[00:08:23.940] – Chris
But when you apply that relationship with scientific methods, again, the three times per week the small group, one to one, one to three, one to five. If you tie in cultural relevance, if you tie in language, if you’re able to put all of those pieces together aligned with the classroom instruction and the support of the school system, you can really see transformational results in a very short time.

[00:08:48.720] – Steve
I guess you answered the question that was going around in my head as to what part of the impact is the instruction that’s occurring and what part of the impact is the relationship, belief, values that are communicated as part of the process.

[00:09:11.980] – Chris
Yeah, it’s amazing because when we recruit tutors to come work with us, not for us, but with us, a lot of them come in thinking that, okay, I have this academic knowledge that I’m going to pass on to another human being younger or just may not have the same skillset. And what we discover is that the tutor really starts to look introspective to themselves, understanding, how do I make this connection? How do I make every minute count? And what it really comes down to is not their academic knowledge, but their ability to build a high quality relationship between themselves and the tutee. Because the tutee already knows some things. The question is, how does the tutor go about unlocking that? And then, with that skill development of unlocking the tutee skill set, they recognize that, wow, there may have been some challenges in life because we all have them. There may just have been not the most positive educational experiences for one reason or another. Life is challenging enough, and we all need support in one way or another. And it’s one of the other common things that I say is that we all have tutors in life.

[00:10:25.440] – Chris
You had mentioned as a big brother, you were a tutor. Managers are tutors. Sports coaches are tutors. The term, just although it’s limited to education in one sense, it exists everywhere in every industry, in every walk of life, every day.

[00:10:44.480] – Steve
So you want to talk a little bit about the training that you put together for the people that are going to tutor?

[00:10:51.300] – Chris
Sure. So when we train tutors, we train tutors to see themselves not just as content deliverers, but as developmental partners. The preparation that we provide includes the foundation for the high impact tutoring research. We want them to know the why behind what we’re doing and the evidence. We talk about executive functioning and metacognition, child development, like how the brain works at different stages. We also talked about cultural responsiveness, because when you’re able to make that connection potentially from someone who may have a different culture as you, it’s extremely positive realizing like, wow, we’re all human and we’re really all in this together. So if we’re more collaborative and cooperative, we’re going to achieve results much faster. And then we talked about, again, a little bit about the trauma-informed practices, like what folks have gone through that may have created barriers in their learning or even their ability to accelerate. And then, of course, there’s the subject matter expertise, making sure that the tutors are competent in whichever subject that they want to tutor over time. Because the way that they taught math or algebra or geometry or calculus or even literacy, essay writing is very, very different than it was five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

[00:12:07.940] – Steve
I’m hearing a need for the tutor to learn how to observe, reflect, and think compared to walking in with a plan I’m going to deliver.

[00:12:21.600] – Chris
Absolutely. And one of the things that I’ve learned in this work is I’ve learned to focus on the language. A teacher has a very particular skillset and a profession. A teacher can be a tutor. A teacher can tutor, but there is such thing as a tutor, and it is very relationship-based. It is, again, there’s a number of things that go into it. And part of the work that we’re striving to do is to get tutoring recognized as not only as a very proficient vocation, but as a profession in the future, because there’s a real possibility of a tutor to educator pipeline. Over our 13 years in existence, we’ve had a number of tutors that have been with us for a while. All of a sudden, the lightbulb clicks and they become educators. They get involved in public education, they become teachers, and they recognize the skillset that they developed as tutors so they can reach all the students in their classroom.

[00:13:25.040] – Steve
That matches with districts that have a paraprofessional to teacher pipeline and some really positive results when people take what they learned in that position, like in the position of a tutor, and then take that background and knowledge into a study of education. They’re in a total different spot than the person who heads off to college with none of that background and begins studying to be a teacher.

[00:14:00.060] – Chris
Imagine just the leadership skills that the tutor develops, the time management, communication with different types of individual, a competitiveness in terms of wanting to achieve an outcome, having a measurable goal, and how that translates into leadership in corporate America, how it translates into work or into politics or any of those things. All the things that I’ve been able to accomplish, I can bring back to my early days of tutoring and learning to be a really acute listener to the individuals across from me, very focused. Because if you’re speaking to a child and if you don’t have that child’s attention or you’re not able to keep that child’s attention, they’re going to wander off, and whatever you were trying to impart to them at that amount of time is gone. So seconds matter, and it really makes a difference. Imagine tutoring all of your life what skills that brings to you just as a human being to be able to support others around you.

[00:15:03.440] – Steve
Powerful. I’m thinking of the power of it from the coaching work that I do in classrooms and my work with teachers. My goal with a teacher is that you’re looking to have the largest number of students spending the greatest amount of time engaged in the most appropriate, what I call, learning production behavior.

[00:15:34.760] – Chris
Yes.

[00:15:35.480] – Steve
That’s part of what makes teaching so dang difficult is – you’ve got 23, 24 kids in a classroom and to have as many of those kids engaged in the most important activity for them because you can have kids engaged in a learning activity, but they’re already ahead of it or they’re too far below it. I frequently use the example of that’s the payoff of tutoring. The effective tutor is 30 minutes with an effective tutor is maximizing those 30 minutes.

[00:16:07.800] – Chris
Absolutely.

[00:16:09.340] – Steve
Compared to 30 minutes in a classroom with 25 other people. And that has nothing to say about the skill level of the teacher.

[00:16:19.860] – Chris
Oh, they’re different symphonies, right? They’re different conductors. And as you have mentioned, what you focus on with the teacher and what I focus on with the tutor, one, is recognizing the profession of teaching and the work that it takes to become a teacher, and then recognizing the difference in terms of being a teacher versus being a tutor. Small group, very focused, targeted instruction with the desired outcome in a particular subject area so that that child could be more productive or even complementary in the classroom of that teacher. As I mentioned, because I had the skillset that I had when I was little, I was very beneficial. I was a positive influence in my classroom with the teacher because of my learning ability and my willingness to share that ability and to connect with a number of folks. In my case, as I mentioned earlier, it was my friends in kindergarten. I want to go out to play. They want to go out to play. Hey, how do we get there? Oh, okay, sure. I’ll show them how to do this. Let’s go. Again, just a very profound situation for me now reflecting on this now that I’ve been in this work, leaving corporate America in 2013 to launch Bay Area Tutoring Association for that particular purpose.

[00:17:44.420] – Steve
I’m guessing you must have some awesome stories of the tutors recognizing the rewards that are coming to them when they get engaged with you and see that impact on students.

[00:18:04.920] – Chris
I’m still connected to a number of tutors that I’ve been working with, and they’re all over the place. They’re in corporate America, they’re in education, they’re in athletics, they’re in politics. And we talk about the early experiences that they had, and they tell me about, “well, I remember when I came in and I thought…” And I’m like, “I know you did” because I know you don’t recognize the transformation that happens to you as an individual when you’re able to spend this time, again, in very small group settings or one-to-one making these relationship-based connections. It stays with you. We also really recommend in the one-on-one tutoring or even in the high-impact tutoring is that tutors only work with so many kids over the course of time because they take each of those individual identities with them and looking to find ways to do that. Very different from teaching in a classroom. And again, I’ll just continue to praise public education and the teachers that do it. They are heroes. They have super powers beyond imagination. That sometimes I don’t even think they realize that they have in the work that they do over the course of a school year.

[00:19:20.860] – Chris
Whereas tutoring is very laser-like focus for specific sprints, almost like, again, it’s very targeted in terms of the work that it’s supposed to do to allow the teacher to really give them the space in the room. Because we do have an education system that has layers to it. And if a child comes in not ready for that classroom, it is the responsibility of that teacher. And one of the biggest things that’s really accelerated or increased the awareness of tutoring is the global pandemic. We’re still recovering from the global pandemic in so many different ways. There are kids that are coming into classrooms that are not only not at grade level, but far below grade level, even though their age is that the classroom that they’re in is age-appropriate. So how are you going to solve that? You could, in some instances, solve it with a paraeducator because of their training. But a tutor is adjacent to a paraeducator. Can a paraeducator be a tutor? Yes. Can a tutor be a paraeducator? Yes. With the appropriate training. So again, there are these things that are there are these forces that are looking to strengthen public education, because on the other side of tutoring, for those that can afford or have the disposable income and have access, their learning is just continuing to accelerate.

[00:20:48.600] – Chris
So the opportunity gap or the achievement gap continues to widen because for those that have and were able to get through COVID with either private tutoring or a parent with, or a guardian or a relative with an academic or a college degree in comparison to those that don’t have, only just continue to widen the learning gap. .

[00:21:11.680] – Steve
Yeah So I’m wondering about how AI comes into play here with adding potential for your tutors?

[00:21:22.740] – Chris
Yeah, there’s a lot of conversation around AI, having a tech background. The folks that are dealing with AI, they’re like, We can have AI tutors. Not really. AI tutors, while they can be effective in some areas, they don’t necessarily build the self-efficacy in individuals like a smile from another human being that’s in your proximity. AI offers a lot to tutoring and education as a whole. I do believe AI is accelerating feedback cycles and expanding access opportunities. I think AI can, one, provide formative assessments, differentiate in practices, generate target problem sets, or even connect with students based on their areas of interest. And there’s so many things that AI can do. And the way that we approach AI today is that, I will never say Bay Area Tutoring Association is going to have AI tutors. We will have tutors that are trained on how to use AI to improve their practice.

[00:22:31.120] – Steve
I’m almost thinking that one of the elements is the tutor being able to teach the student how the student can use AI for help and support.

[00:22:44.420] – Chris
Exactly.

[00:22:45.440] – Steve
Yeah.

[00:22:46.220] – Chris
exactly. The best model is that it’s human-led and AI-enhanced. It’s never going to be AI-led and human-enhanced because the nuances of relationship in comparison to algorithm could never be mastered.

[00:23:03.820] – Steve
Chris, I’m wondering if you’ve got some thoughts for people at the principal or school district level, as well as an individual classroom. If they happen to be in a community where there isn’t a tutoring program. Thoughts on things people might want to look to be exploring as to how to make those things happen?

[00:23:31.360] – Chris
Wow, really good question. I don’t know a community where there isn’t some tutoring going on. Is it effective tutoring? Is it tutoring at scale? Are you measuring impact? Are the tutors being trained? I think those are the things that I would lean into more. There are peer-to-peer tutors like I was. There are near-peer tutoring opportunities. So if there are communities that are rural, of course, now we have online, where all of that may not be as effective as the in-person, which we really strive to do, but there are some places that we can’t get to on a consistent basis. But anyone can get online and build relationship. That way, again, it’s not the same as the in-person, but the online tutoring is a possibility which opens up any organization to get tutoring from anywhere in the world. We’ve had tutors on the East Coast work with us during the school day. We’ve had some tutors internationally work with us in the mornings. So again, this is one of the, I don’t want to call it the benefits of the pandemic, but it really opened up and build more communicative infrastructures so that tutoring can reach more places more effectively.

[00:24:51.860] – Chris
And when you are supported by, again, John Hopkins, there’s a group out of the US in Washington, DC that that’s associated with policy called Accelerate. When you connect that with the work of the United Nations and UNESCO and the other organizations around the country, there’s really an opportunity for us to elevate the quality of education as a whole around the globe. And I see tutoring as being a part of the permanent infrastructure. Some of the other things that are happening in the US is that there are apprenticeship now opportunities where tutoring is being recognized as a vocation with pathways into early childhood education education into paraeducators, special education, substitute teacher, teacher. So there’s a lot of opportunities for economic mobility in the space, as well as being an economic engine in certain communities, because we know an educated community is a thriving community.

[00:25:48.340] – Steve
Well, Chris, I know that you’ve made a lot happen through the Bay Area Tutoring Association. I’m wondering, you got a picture in your head that’s driving your efforts moving forward from here of things that you’re hoping to make happen?

[00:26:07.540] – Chris
Sure. This picture in my head, I would say that about a year and a half ago, I was contacted by a gentleman by the name of Mohan Dahl from the Australian Tutoring Association. And again, he brought me into this UNESCO community of practice focused on educational opportunity and equity, sustainable development goal number four. And And the topic was tutoring. So the idea that around the world that they’re talking about this topic that I’m thinking solely about the Bay Area on, because that’s where I grew up and I care very deeply, have very deep roots. And now I’m involved in this global community. I’m like, wow, how do I go about this work? I wish I had five more of me to be able to do this, but I’m grateful to you, Steve, for elevating this conversation on your podcast and recognizing that I see the future of tutoring as embedded in public education, the way that libraries and counselors are. Not an emergency intervention, but a permanent infrastructure. I see tutoring as a workforce pipeline, an equity engine, an entrepreneurship opportunity, and a leadership incubator. I see districts and policymakers, which you’re seeing now across the States, because if you do any research and you do a research on US investment in tutoring across the States, you’ll be like, wow, they’re really starting to lean into it in a very, very different way.

[00:27:46.880] – Chris
And I’m driven by the belief that several of my colleagues talk about and that a child’s zip code or where they live should not determine their academic ceiling.

[00:27:58.800] – Steve
Yeah, right on. Well, Chris, what’s the best way for our listeners to follow up on the work that you’re doing or shoot questions to you that they might have?

[00:28:09.340] – Chris
Sure. So you can learn more about our organization at bayareatutor.org. Very conservative website. I’m excited about the way that we’ve designed that, because if you don’t know what we do, you can’t really find us. We’re very intentional about if you know what to search for, you can find us. I can be emailed at chris.norwood@bayareatutor.org. You’ll see me on LinkedIn, Christopher Norwood, Milpitas. You’ll see my profile on LinkedIn really focuses more on my governance work, but we also have a Bay Area Tutoring Association LinkedIn page. I look forward to questions from educators and district leaders and other folks to make this movement continue this. The future of tutoring is global and collaborative.

[00:29:01.960] – Steve
We’ll post your website and email in the lead-in to the podcast, make it easy for folks to find. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

[00:29:12.740] – Chris
Always. Thank you.

[00:29:16.580] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.

DownloadPrint