Intervention: What Schools are doing to Help

For a long time now, some students have failed classes because of the lack of understanding of their lessons. Now, schools have stepped in with a new program to give aid to those students: Intervention. Intervention is a program available for students that are either failing or do not understand the lessons that have been taught. Teachers have twenty minutes after lunch to give support to these students and to help them understand the lessons and work involved. Intervention also allows students to make up work that they could not complete.
“I went to Intervention because I did not do my homework,” says a Senior at Kaplan High School. “I did not do it because I either did not understand it or I had to work, so I never had the time to do it.” When asked if he considered Intervention as a punishment for not doing his work, he said, “No, because a punishment is something where you gain nothing. In Intervention, you earn back what you lost. The school’s counselor was also willing to give her opinions on Intervention.
“Intervention was started because, as a faculty, we go out to other schools to see what is making them successful, and we had visited two schools that had the Intervention system set up and we saw that they were successful with it.” After asking if she believed that Intervention worked, she said, “It is really hard to see the effects of Intervention. It will probably take two or three years to see. It does help some students, but it is only as effective as the teachers make it.”
She made a very good point: “... but it is only as effective as the teachers make it.” It is up to the teachers to make Intervention work to its fullest potential. If a teacher assigns a student to Intervention for not doing their homework and then does absolutely nothing about it during Intervention, then the student still does not have the homework completed, be it whether the student did not want to do the homework or if the student could not understand the work involved. If the teacher works with the student to complete an assignment, the student will be able to learn the work involved in the lesson, and will be able to complete similar assignments later in the future.