The pull in this moment goes two ways, and both are costly. Teach the whole thing again and the fourteen who understood are bored. Move on and the fourteen who did not carry the gap into next week's lesson, where it will look like a different problem.
What makes a reteach work
- Name the error before you fix it. Look at the wrong answers. If most chose the same distractor, they share a misconception, and that is cheaper to correct than a general lack of understanding. Ask three students to explain how they got there. You will usually hear it in under a minute.
- Do not repeat the first explanation louder. It already failed. Use a different representation: a different example, a picture, a worked problem with the reasoning spoken aloud, or a contrast between a right and wrong solution.
- Keep it short and aimed. Ten minutes with the students who missed it, while the rest do something else, beats forty minutes for everyone.
- Worked example, then fade. Show a full solution, then a partly done one, then a blank one. That sequence is the worked example effect, and it suits a skill that was nearly there. See the worked example effect.
- Check with two or three questions the next day, not a re-test. You want to know whether it moved, not to rerun the whole assessment.
- Bring it back later. A skill that was repaired on Wednesday can still slip by the following Wednesday. See spaced repetition for why.
All of that works with a marker and a whiteboard.
Where ClassSense fits the reteach
On the Students tab, each skill is a column. A column where most students are Struggling or Developing is your reteach, and the tab lists reteach and reinforce suggestions where the class is weak on a skill. The dashboard's Students who need you card names individual students who are stuck on one.
The skill pack for that skill is also reteach material in its own right. It has an explanation at three depths, worked examples, strategy variants (other ways to approach the same problem) and the common misconceptions named. If the first explanation was a procedure, open the strategy variant. If the wrong model is the problem, read the misconception section and teach straight at it. Create Content can turn that same skill pack into Task Cards, a Worksheet or a Presentation with speaker notes.
Find the column
Open the Students tab and look for the skill with the most red.
Read the pack
Check the misconception and strategy sections for a different way in.
Teach ten focused minutes
Pull the students who missed it. Others carry on with practice.
Let them practice that skill
The column updates as they answer. Mastered skills come back later for a quick check.
Be realistic about the signal. The grid is only as current as the practice students have done, so a skill nobody has practiced shows nothing. Practice in the app is multiple choice, which finds a lot of misconceptions and misses some. Your quiz and your ears still matter, and the app does not know which reteach method you tried first.
If one student rather than half the class is the problem, see students who fall behind. For the kind of group work this needs, see small-group instruction.
Common questions
How do I know which skill to reteach?
Look for the column on the Students tab with the most Struggling or Developing students, and check the dashboard for students stuck on it. Then check against your own quiz.
Does ClassSense reteach for me?
It gives you the material: alternate explanations, worked examples and named misconceptions in the skill pack, and documents from Create Content. The teaching itself is yours.
Do students have to redo the whole unit?
No. Students practice the one skill pack. Mastery updates for that skill only.
Can I make a quick check on just one skill?
Yes. Generate an Assessment or Worksheet from that skill pack in Create Content, and read it first.