Title: Reviving Reteaching - Educational Leadership
Headings: Art and Science of Teaching / Reviving Reteaching
Art and Science of Teaching / Reviving Reteaching
When to Reteach
Introducing New Content
Reviewing Previously Taught Content
Tried and True
KEYWORDS
Requesting Permission

Content: Although the term lives on in many district curriculum guides, professional literature rarely addresses it. It's time to revive awareness of this powerful instructional tool. Many of the positive effects reported in the research literature on formative assessment are connected to reteaching. At a basic level, reteaching means "teaching again" content that students failed to learn. Some form of assessment always accompanies reteaching; such assessments reveal student misconceptions or errors in understanding, which clarify which content the teacher must reteach. In working with teachers across the United States, we have found that effective teachers intuitively employ the basic principles of reteaching even though they might not use the term to describe what they're doing. For reteaching to be effective, however, teachers must use a different approach from the one they initially used, one that builds on previous activities but that focuses on the omissions or errors in student thinking that resulted from these activities. When to Reteach
Reteaching typically occurs in two situations: when introducing new content in a lesson and when reviewing previously taught content that students need for an upcoming lesson.