Nationwide, students face the prospect of up to 10 months of learning loss due to the pandemic. For students of color, that learning loss is even higher (12 to 16 months).  
How can educators and school leaders help students recover missed learning due to COVID-19? Traditional intervention approaches include giving students work from previous grades or subject areas that they haven’t mastered before students are given increasingly challenging material. This practice is actually remediation, and it will be insufficient to help students make up lost ground.
Instead, “just in time” (JIT) intervention, a proven strategy for helping students efficiently close learning gaps so they can quickly access rigorous grade-level content, takes a more focused approach. By identifying the narrow set of prerequisite skills students need to master in order to be ready for grade level content, JIT gives students a “dose” of intervention to teach them those missing prerequisite skills so they can be ready to access grade-level material quickly. This allows students and teachers to chip away at learning gaps with intentionality and relevance over time, versus holding kids back until they have mastered all of their missed learning. 
JIT is at the top of most recommended academic acceleration strategies, and rightly so.
But JIT can be challenging to implement well because it requires both a different mindset than typically used to catch students up and it requires the coordinated use of school resources. Implementation requires school teams to adopt the mindset of a race car pit crew and ensure four key enabling conditions are in place. 
Like a great race car pit crew, the JIT approach to intervention requires educators to:

• Pinpoint the most critical interventions 
• Ruthlessly prioritize where to start
• Focus on getting the driver (or in this case, the student) back on the track quickly

In contrast, like a mediocre auto mechanic, traditional remediation approaches: 

• Run unnecessary tests
• Require addressing everything at once
• Result in lots of time off the road (or in this case, time not spent on rigorous grade-level content)

JIT intervention includes four key steps to implement, and four enabling school conditions to implement well. 
Four key steps of JIT intervention cycles:

1. Identify: Identify prerequisite skill gaps for upcoming grade-level content using a diagnostic. 
2. Plan: Plan to use high quality curricular materials to address prerequisite skill gaps before teaching the grade-level content. 
3. Teach: Provide targeted instruction to students in prerequisite skills, leveraging various configurations (whole group, small group, 1:1). 
4. Assess: After grade-level lessons have been taught, reassess students to determine mastery/readiness for grade level content and ongoing intervention needs.

While there is more than one “right way” to do JIT intervention, we have found these four enabling school conditions necessary for schools to have in place in order to do this work effectively:

• Right materials: Schools will need high-quality, standards-aligned curriculum materials for core lessons and intervention lessons. They will also need diagnostics aligned to their curriculum that can be used to identify key prerequisite knowledge and skills prior to a unit of instruction.
• Right data: Schools will need to regularly collect and analyze diagnostic data, including having a process, and dedicated time, for data analysis.
• Right schedule: Teachers will need sufficient time to analyze data and plan for intervention. There will also need to be dedicated time for students to receive the targeted intervention on the prerequisite skills prior to the upcoming unit.  
• Right people: Schools will need clear instructional leadership responsible for ensuring intervention happens effectively. Leadership will also be critical in coordinating resources, schedules, data, and teachers in support of interventions. (Additional teachers and interventionists to support with instruction are great to have if possible, but are not essential to do JIT intervention well.)

To help leaders and educators looking to implement JIT intervention into their program this fall, our team has created a simple tool to help assess readiness and provide guidance on implementation. 
With limited time, energy and resources, educators will need to get more strategic and efficient about identifying and supporting students’ most critical needs. Bellwether’s “Just in Time” Intervention Planning Toolkit can provide a helpful roadmap on how to do that.