Growing up as one of two girls among nine children, Diana Vroman understood that her big family was “pretty spread out with the resources.”
School was different, however.
“I really depended on the resources that I got from my instructors and educators in my schools who really helped me hit those outcomes that kids my age were already at,” says Vroman, a junior Special Education major.
“The teachers rounded me out,” she adds, “and I enjoyed that environment because I got a lot of support there and a lot of kindness there.”
When as an adult working with children through the Crystal Lake Park District, she met several young people with special needs and found herself gravitating toward them. With that came the memories of the difference teachers had made in her own life.
“Now that my kids are growing up, I wanted to push forth and hit those dreams I have for myself,” says the mother of a 16-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son. “Having the opportunity to be part of the Special Education program was just the next step in solidifying my next career.”
Vroman, who will graduate next May, is enhancing her academic preparation as a tutor for the Illinois Tutoring Initiative.
Launched in 2022 and funded with federal pandemic relief for Illinois schools, the project positively impacts thousands of children in third- through eighth-grades whose learning has been impeded by COVID-19.
Managing the 16-county hub of Region 2, NIU hires and supervises hundreds of tutors who provide evidence-based, high-impact tutoring to accelerate student learning one-on-one or in small groups of no more than three students each.
Huskies employed as tutors can expect that their practice will pay dividends once they have their own classrooms, says Amanda Baum, NIU’s coordinator for the Illinois Tutoring Initiative.
“When we get in front of a classroom of students, you might have 35 kids in there, and you’re trying to remember to take attendance. You’re dealing with a student coming in late and whatever they experienced before they walk through your door. You’re dealing with 35 different levels of readiness,” Baum says, “and when you’re a new teacher, that’s a lot to juggle because you don’t maybe have that habit down as muscle memory yet.”
But tutoring provides “that differentiation piece, helping students engage in learning along with whatever they’re carrying in that emotional backpack from the day. Getting them to redirect and work on being a learner is really good practice in a low-risk setting,” she adds.
“The more our NIU students can practice that – thinking on their feet and being responsive to students – the more it’s going to make it a bit easier when they’re running their own classrooms of upward of 25 students,” she says.
“I also think it’s been a great opportunity for some of our students to look at where their students are academically and what they’re interested in, and then find resources to meet the needs of those students as learners and as people,” she adds. “That’s a really important skill for a teacher, and that’s how you become that teacher who meets students where they are – and I think our tutors are doing a great job of that.”
BAUM’S TUTORS TRAIN for their jobs using standardized, statewide modules that focus on high-impact tutoring, engaging all learners and culturally responsive teaching.
They also are coached on fidelity checklists to ensure they structure their lessons to include relationship-building, goal-setting, direct instruction and supported and independent practice.
Myriad resources covering educational strategies, activities and games also are available digitally via Illinois State University’s ReggieNet portal, which houses videos, articles and information on the Common Core standards.
Continual improvement is baked into the process.
“After every session, they and their students do a feedback form, and at the end of each week, they do a little more intensive weekly reflection where they tell us what they were working on this week, what materials they used, what went well, what didn’t go well and what they’ll be working on next week,” Baum says.
“We read them, and if we notice somebody struggling with their student – say, remembering multiplication facts – we’ll send an email to say, ‘Hey, we read this in your reflection. Here are some strategies we’re using.’ We’re responsive to what they write,” she adds, “and when we’re on site for our visits, we’ll check in with them and then send an email. ‘Hey, we noticed you’re doing this, and that was really great. Have you thought about trying this?’ ”
She is pleased with Year One.
“I’m always impressed with the way that I see our tutors engage with their students. When you walk through and you catch a snippet of conversation, you can tell that our tutors are really invested in their students and that they’re getting to know them as people,” Baum says.
“I’m impressed with how many of our tutors are creating materials that they know link to the interests of their students, and that are challenging but doable, based on what they know about their students’ skillsets,” she adds. “I’m also impressed with some of the things that I’ve seen tutors create on their own to play with their students. We have some who are making great games and finding great activities, and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I need to let other tutors know about this because kids would love it.’ ”
For their part, Baum says, tutors report climbing levels of confidence in their students.
Some children are emerging from their shells thanks to being able to interact one-on-one with tutors or in small groups. Some of the students in middle school are raising their grades – and feeling proud about their report cards.
“We’ve seen a lot of success and a lot of smiles,” Baum says.
“Two days ago, I was at a tutoring site where somebody’s mom came to pick them up a little early, and the students was like, ‘Please! I want to stay for the rest of my session!’ ” she adds. “There’s a lot of positive things happening, and we’re excited to build on that next year.”
GENEVIEVE GIGLIO IS A senior Middle Level Teaching and Learning major from Belvidere who is majoring in Language Arts with an ESL endorsement.
Becoming a teacher aligns with her moral compass.
“Making a difference in people’s lives is a big thing for me,” Giglio says. “Middle school students – adolescents – especially need a lot of help. They’ve got a lot of stuff going on in their heads, and being one of those people who helps to guide them, if it’s in life skills, or if it’s in content like language arts, is really big for me.”
Language Arts also seemed the obvious path for her NIU College of Education degree.
“I love to read. That’s one of my biggest hobbies, and ever since I was in middle school myself, reading and language arts were always my favorite classes,” she says. “And now, with the achievement gap COVID created, reading and writing skills were the first thing to be knocked down and out of these kids. Making a difference by building that back up is important to me.”
Realizing that she could fulfill that passion by tutoring has proven “amazing” for Giglio, who is working with one student at Hiawatha Elementary School in Kirkland and appreciating the task of creating individualized lesson plans.
“Building those foundational skills with him, and working on fluency and phonics, has been really good for him,” she says. “I can see him building his skills up and starting to close that gap, and I know that I’m making a difference.”
Currently student-teaching this semester at Huntley Middle School in DeKalb, Giglio seen how tutoring enhances her work in front of a classroom.
She has been placed in a reading intervention class with an enrollment of about 15 students, an assignment that parallels the mission of the Illinois Tutoring Initiative.
“These students are really, really low on reading and they need a lot of support. Some come from pretty rough backgrounds, too, so that has a major role in how they are in my classroom,” Giglio says.
“With the class size so small, I can really build those relationships with my kids, really get to know them and really sit down one-on-one to help them. I can see the impact I’m having on them, and it’s been great,” she adds.
“Being in front of a class of 15 allows me to see those little things I might not normally notice in a bigger group – things that tend to just fly by you – and when I have one-on-one time, it’s easier to say, ‘Oh, this isn’t working for you specifically. I can change that, and I can do more for what you specifically need.’ It’s teaching me some flexibility and how to dial in on what specific students need.”
VROMAN’S EXPERIENCE DURING the pandemic partly influenced her application to work for the Illinois Tutoring Initiative.
“I really love how they’re trying to find and help students affected by everything that happened through COVID,” says Vroman, who lives in Marengo.
During the lockdowns, she says, “I worked with students through the park district who were not able to go to school, and their parents enrolled them in a recreational, e-learning program with me. I saw how hard it was for kids to make those connections to learn when they were so split off from normal relationships they would have in education.”
Separation took its toll.
“You saw firsthand the fallout of children socially. Emotionally. Their learning abilities. Their social skills. You could not see it all happen and then deny that it exists because it was very clear. And once you work with children, and you see them coming in not at the levels children normally would be at, you definitely saw those deficits,” she says.
“To have a program that’s going out there and that’s going to help students reach more positive outcomes in hitting those developments and lowering those deficiencies? It was a no-brainer to want to help with that, and it’s been a really great experience.”
She is working with three students this semester, two at Hiawatha and one at Lincoln Elementary School in DeKalb.
Her two fourth-grade girls are struggling with math and numbers, including fractions and how to read clocks and graphs.
“These are difficult things but things that, at their instructional level, they should have already met,” Vroman says, “so I talked to them and learned their personal feelings on their own growth and where they wanted to be. We came up with fractions – that was something that they really wanted to feel more confident in – and there clearly were some other things like multiplication and being more familiar with factors and multiples. It’s really a scaffold growth they needed.”
And they’re progressing.
“They needed to build on understanding number-sets and numbers as multiples,” she says, “and then, after they got those, it was easy for us to look at those fractions. They felt more confident in fractions and using them in different operations, and then we could look back and identify more goals they wanted to meet.”
Vroman’s fifth-grade boy also wrestles with math, she says, although his issues are in mental processing.
“I could tell that executive functioning was difficult for him,” she says. “He had an idea of the problems, and remembered parts of them, but for him to put all those things together was really difficult.”
While his classmates and peers successfully completed the problems in the classroom, “he would just sit there and not know what to do – not because he didn’t have the ability but because he wasn’t sure how to process it.”
“So we worked a lot on think-alouds – talking out loud to himself instead of trying to do it all in his head – because when he was trying to process that mental executive function, he was getting lost,” Vroman says. “For him to verbalize what he was doing out loud, and to write as he goes, crossing off steps as he completed them, was a very big support for him.”
Vroman also taught the boy visual cues for math, including drawing and later erasing arrows on a whiteboard to track the order of operations.
Both strategies are working.
“Just the other day, he said, ‘I never thought I could be a kid who could do mental math, and look at me now!’ ” she says. “It just made me so proud that I could make those differences.”
Meanwhile, she is learning about herself.
She can burrow deeper to understand students individually.
She can cultivate the type of personal relationships that yield knowledge of student backgrounds and interests can help her to develop curricula that appropriately supports their needs.
She can exceed the limitations of the provided materials and strategies.
“If students are not interested in what you’re teaching, then they’re not going to be interested in anything,” Vroman says, “so I’ve learned that if I keep digging and researching, I’m going to find something that can make that connection. I guess I’ve seen that I’m pretty good at that, so I’m feeling really good and confident, and that being one of my strengths is something I can offer to other students – being able to make a connection with them that is deeper than just learning the basic material and is what really helps them.”
