Repetition, Review, and Reteaching: The BEST Educators Utilize These Strategies

Mastery comes through repetition, review, and reteaching. How often should one utilize repetition, review, and reteaching? Those three strategies should be indelibly embedded into every aspect of the teaching-learning cycle. My next question is this, and it is an important one…

Does your school system’s pacing guide allow for plentiful repetition, review, and reteaching?

If your school system’s pacing guides don’t allow for FLEXIBLE reteaching, spiraling review, and repetition, those pacing guides are destined to fail (almost immediately)for a large majority of students, especially at-risk students and students in SpEd. In my article, Pacing Guides are #@!%, I talk about the perils of pacing guides. I can say this without hesitation, the very best teachers(and whose students consistently led their districts and state in test scores) taught for mastery. Hear me on this…

Full cohort mastery can only be achieved with plentiful repetition, review, and reteaching. Anything less than that is simply crippling effective pedagogy. Here is a novel idea….why not trust great teachers to decide when they need to those things? No spread sheets. No data conference. No walk through. No second guessing by a muddlheaded, mid-tier administrator. Just trust the teacher in knowing when they need to back off the throttle.

Why are reteaching, review, and repetition of key concepts essential? The main reason most pacing guides will fail is that there is a 0% chance that every student is mastering everything at the same rate. Hence, the need for the three Rs(repetition, review, reteaching). Also, some lessons are just not as effective as others. Many systems rely on on cookie cutter lesson delivery(every teacher reads the same scripted lesson) which come directly from vendor products.

I have taught Mathematics from both Investigations and Everyday Mathematics. Those are two, proven canned delivery programs for Mathematics. They rely on teaching thinking and learning mathematical processes. But as good as those programs are, some of those lessons are weak. Weak lesson design or even just a bad day teaching(those happen for any number of reasons!), will often call for going back over material again.

Aggressive implementation of pacing guide timelines almost always created gaps in my students’ learning. I finally just took the system beating at data conferences(for being behind on the pacing guide), and started teaching slower. Slow is fast, and fast is smooth! Guess what happened? My students performed at a much higher rate.

Aggressive implementation of pacing guides do not allow for the customization of learning. Not at the building level. Not at the classroom level. And certainly not at the student level. Teaching students is not an assembly line. Think of your own kids in your family. They are all different. They learn differently. Try “assembly line learning” in your household and let me know how that works out!

The gold standard of an education program should be academic proficiency. Let me say it louder…THE GOLD STANDARD OF ANY EDUCATION PROGRAM SHOULD ACADEMIC PROFICIENCY. The only way to achieve that gold standard is to teach for mastery. The only way to achieve mastery is to having pacing guides which allow for plentiful repetition, review, and reteaching.

I will close with this. When runners are not allowed to recover, injuries are simply a matter of “when” and not “if.” I believe this is true in regards to the human brain. There are times when we need to slow down the pace, allow everyone to rest/catch-up, and ready for the next big push. “Down time” is as important as pushing forward. In my mind, “down time” is found in repetition, review, and reteaching.

Teaching for mastery should be our goal, not checking the pacing guide box.

ProTip: In my 20+ years of teaching, I almost always found the best teachers were a few days behind on the pacing guide, sometimes even a week. Some(not all) academic coaches and admins were ruthless in their criticism of those teachers who chose mastery over pacing. Those teachers would out perform everyone in the system. Do you think an apology was ever offered by the academic coach or admins? Nope. Those folks are no where to be found when their inflexibility results in poor academic performance on standardized common assessments.

Licensed thumbnail photo purchased from Yurii Karvatskyi.