Extending Opportunity to Learn for Students Placed At Risk

This article describes a viable alternative to hiring full-time certified teachers or to using lay volunteers to provide children at risk of failing in school with academic coaches (tutors). The Academic Coaching Program described herein recruited and trained students enrolled in a university's school of education programs to serve as academic coaches primarily for 7th and 8th graders in an inner-city school in which 96% of the students are placed at risk by the socioeconomic (SES) status of their families. The program extended the school's regular instructional programs in reading and mathematics. It provided the at-risk students with high-quality coaching by university students through a systematic process of training the university students in the school's reading and mathematics programs, monitoring them as they coached, and providing feedback to the coaches on a regular basis.