Note: The following is a post sent to us by Jodi Iverson who is a teacher at Chicago Bulls College Prep. We put customers’ posts on our blog without any modification. Any opinion here is not necessarily ours. If you also want to send us a blog post, please send it by email to admin@mathzee.com .

One of the most important duties of an educator is to assess students. Teachers must know where each of their students stands when it comes to mastering a new skill or standard. Assessment can be a daunting task on its own, but one of the most critical elements comes after the assessment: reteaching. In my years of experience developing and analyzing assessments, I have noticed that reteaching is when exhaustion sets in–we’ve put so much effort into the creation of the assessment and the data analysis, there’s not much left in us when it comes to planning to reteach. Typically, teachers tend to explain the reteaching concept over and over, but no differently than they did before. When we assume our students just didn’t hear it right the first time, we are doing them a large disservice. Many students just need to see the concept in a new way. Some of the best teachers I know use a variety of learning modalities in their reteaching practices. For math, this often means providing students with tactile and visual representations of concepts, rather than just asking them to do another problem set. True reteaching is when we take the time to meet the students where they are and engage them with meaningful and fun practice. Every child can and will learn, we just need to teach them in a variety of ways!