Robert J. Marzano
Art & Science of Teaching
Reviving Reteaching
Educators have used the term reteaching informally for decades. Madeline Hunter is credited with introducing the term in
the 1980s within her framework for mastery
teaching. 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 con-
nected 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 mis-
conceptions or errors in under-
standing, 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 pre-
vious 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.
Introducing New Content
When introducing new content, the teacher
should continually monitor students’ levels of
understanding to determine whether immediate
reteaching is necessary. For example, the teacher
might periodically ask students to use various
hand signals: Thumbs up means they understand the new content, thumbs down means
they don’t, and thumbs held horizontal means
they understand some parts and are confused
regarding others.
Teachers can also use student response or
voting technologies—commonly referred to
as clickers—to determine students’ perceived
understanding. Students rate how well they
understand specific content; these ratings are
transmitted electronically to a PowerPoint slide
or an interactive whiteboard. Teachers should
design questions that address key aspects of
Many of the positive
effects reported in the
research literature on
formative assessment are
connected to reteaching.
the new content; an incorrect response would
indicate severe misunderstanding. For example,
if students in a science class could not answer
the following question—What is the role of
hypotheses in the scientific method?—they
would clearly be missing essential information.
One strategy that greatly facilitates reteaching
is to present the content in small increments;
I call this approach chunking. For example, a
teacher presenting new content about the human
skeletal system might present a few selected
characteristics and then allow students time to
process this new information by having them
ask questions or summarize what it means. He
or she would then present a few more characteristics, and so on. After exposing students to
each small chunk of information, the teacher
can ask students to rate their confidence in
their understanding or ask them questions to
