Empowering Teacher Teams to Revisit and Reteach Tricky Lessons

Teachers are constantly constrained by time and a mile-long list of standards, so when they determine that at least some of their students have achieved mastery, they typically move on to the next lesson. But what about the remaining students who need more support and learning opportunities?

Though the pressure is real, teachers, not pacing plans, are best at determining when to keep going and when to pause for further instruction. This year, my school’s administrators gave our first-grade teacher team the academic freedom to lean into John Hattie’s research on collective efficacy. We were able to slow down and intentionally plan for what students needed to master an essential writing standard. The reteaching process took three weeks, rather than three days, and through the power of equity and collective planning, we saw fantastic results.

Here’s how your grade-level team can identify a reteaching opportunity, attain buy-in from administrators, and then come up with an inclusive strategy for all of your students.

Diagnosing the Problem

A few months into the school year, we had our first formative writing assessment: Write three sentences on a given topic. Our first-grade teaching team noticed that in several classrooms, lots of students met and exceeded the standard. As a full grade level, though, we had a problem. None of our multilingual learners or our students with disabilities demonstrated mastery. In total, only 37 percent of first-grade students demonstrated mastery.

We met as a teacher team and discussed next steps. We couldn’t ignore how a large swath of students were struggling. We certainly didn’t want to compound gaps among learners, especially those who needed more time and scaffolds. First-grade teachers are the foundation of a student’s elementary education, we reminded each other. If not us, then who?

As a team, we decided to reach out to our principal and academic coach. We explained our idea and the extended deployment time it would entail. Our administrative team, which preaches collective responsibility, was incredibly supportive.

Revisiting and Reteaching Lesson Plans

Our teacher team tore up the rubric and created a Google Sheet that included every first-grade student. We isolated each section of the writing rubric, as opposed to relying on a total score. After mining the data, we grouped students by need. Some required scaffolds to write a complete sentence; some needed reminders about ending sentences with punctuation; some needed a hand with planning and effectively using a thinking map. And then there were the already-proficient students: How should we push them?

In its simplest form, collective efficacy requires a belief in each and every team member and their ability to be effective educators. For some standards, I might be the strongest teacher. Other times, a colleague will be the strongest teacher. Accepting as much takes time, trust, check-ins, and leaving aside hurt feelings for the benefit of students.

Ultimately, we were able to focus on the data itself. Teachers whose students had initially scored the highest on the writing assessment took the lowest-performing students. It wasn’t an even split, either. (As we reminded each other, this is not about fairness—it’s about equity.) A few enrichment groups were assigned 30 students. My group, which was lower performing, was assigned 10 students.

For three weeks, each group had a different goal and a different scope of learning. We tried our best to fill the gaps while making sure that every student felt appropriately challenged. Students in other classes worked on letter spacing and formation, for instance. One of my colleagues engaged her group of students by asking them to create “spicy” sentences that included adjectives. These fun words caught students’ attention and brought the assignment to life. Another colleague got her group of students to create compound sentences via thinking maps, which they designed on their own. The thinking maps gave her students confidence and agency.

My group was primarily tasked with writing a complete sentence with appropriate punctuation. I relied on structured mini-lessons to build foundational skills, and engaged students by connecting their interests and background knowledge to writing prompts (there was lots of talk about food and animals). Engage, engage, engage! We diagrammed sentences with Post-it Notes, which we used to move around nouns, verbs, and adjectives. This active learning helped students focus on the syntax of the sentence structure, rather than the handwriting of it all.

Establishing a Blueprint for Other Teacher Teams

After three full weeks, students returned to their original class and took the same writing assessment again. This time, the data was magical. Scores went up across the grade level. Students who previously couldn’t write a sentence were writing with ease. Students who’d already mastered the content pushed past the standard and made their writing even better. Mastery among multilingual learners and students with disabilities jumped to 30 percent. As a grade level, our students went from 37 percent to 70 percent mastery. Huge gains!

Additionally, students told us they loved being able to meet with a new teacher and learn new skills. I still have students from my group who see me in the hallway and ask when they can come back for more writing lessons. Others on my team have had similar interactions with their writing groups.

If you’re part of a teacher team that wants to slow down and reattempt a tricky lesson plan, I’d recommend keeping the following points in mind.

No one can do it alone: Silos in education only serve a select group of students within the four walls of their classroom. Each educator has valuable skills and attributes, and we owe it to each other—and our students—to uplift one another. Setting clear boundaries and norms before our team meetings helped us trust one another during the three weeks of reteaching. Our norms outlined the procedures: Be positive and productive, be prepared and present, and celebrate the wins (even the small ones).

Collective planning is more than worksheets and to-do lists: It’s about achieving a shared goal. Our teacher team regularly discussed our progress during weekly professional learning community meetings. We collected writing samples once per week, which allowed us to see student errors and make pivots during the deployment, instead of waiting for the summative assessment. We also shared our struggles with engagement and bounced around ideas. Each of us has unique strengths, and an open dialogue helped us try new strategies that we might not have otherwise considered.

Encourage one another to embrace a mindset shift: At a recent conference I attended, author and teacher Sarah Brown Wessling told educators to be part of a constellation, not the “star.” It’s a helpful perspective for any educator to keep in mind—but especially teacher teams that are embarking on an ambitious reteaching plan.