I remember sitting at my desk during planning period, staring at a stack of unit tests on the causes of World War I. For weeks, I’d watched my sophomores confuse long-term causes like militarism and the alliance system with short-term triggers like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I’d seen it in their document analyses, and I’d heard it in their small-group discussions, but I didn’t have a system for catching those student misconceptions in the moment, so I waited for the test to confirm what I already knew.
By the time the scores came back, we were already two days into the Treaty of Versailles, and those students were trying to understand the peace settlement without the prerequisite skills to understand why the war started in the first place. I knew I needed time-efficient reteaching strategies, but striking the right balance, especially in a high school classroom, was challenging at best.
Reviewing vs. Reteaching: They’re Not the Same
Teachers toss around phrases that sound similar but mean very different things. One of the most common sources of confusion I see in the training work I do now is the distinction between reviewing and reteaching. They aren’t the same. Here’s a clean definition: Reteaching is targeted instruction that addresses specific student misconceptions after initial teaching, using a different instructional approach than the first time. Reviewing reinforces what students already grasped. Reteaching fixes what they didn’t. That distinction matters because if you reteach using the same lecture, the same anchor chart, the same explanation you used the first time, you’re not reteaching. You’re just repeating yourself to students who already showed you that method didn’t work.
Why I Needed a New Method
My old system was simple: sort students by test scores into four bands, pull the below-50% group during the next unit’s reteach time, and go over the old material again. The problem was that the data I needed had been sitting in my classroom for weeks. I saw misconceptions forming in real time during primary-source discussions and on exit tickets. I just wasn’t collecting that information in a format that let me act on it before the summative assessment landed.
This is where formative assessments become critical, not as a gradebook entry, but as a real-time window into student understanding. By the time I intervened, my students were running behind, trying to catch up, while new content piled on top of background knowledge gaps that still weren’t closed.
I started teaching high school history in 2007, and over more than a decade in the classroom, I worked in two very different buildings: a nationally ranked academic school and a Title I CTE school. Between those two contexts, I taught more than 1,700 students before leaving the classroom in 2018 to train K-12 teachers full-time. That dual experience shapes how I think about reteaching because I’ve seen it fail for opposite reasons.
In the high-performing school, teachers assumed students would figure out misconceptions on their own and rarely built in structured time for reteaching. In the Title I school, teachers wanted to reteach everything and ran out of instructional minutes before they could finish grade-level content. Same underlying issue, different symptoms: neither approach was using real-time assessment data to decide what to reteach and when.
The tracking method I’m about to describe isn’t mine originally. It comes from Jamie Jasperson, a math teacher who contributed this system to the blog after I’d already left the classroom. Her small group instruction and reteaching approach completely changed how I train teachers to think about data. I’ve spent years helping individual teachers in every content area adapt Jamie’s framework to their own classrooms.
How Jamie’s Tracking System Works
Here’s what Jamie’s system looked like in her math classroom. Jamie gave an exit ticket at the end of every small group lesson. While students worked on it at her table, she watched their process and gave immediate feedback. If an error revealed a deeper misconception, she recorded it immediately in a data-tracking guide.
After she finished teaching her three regular groups, she took a few minutes to sort students into reteach groups based on specific misconceptions, not scores, not percentages, not arbitrary cutoffs. Three students didn’t understand grouping. Four didn’t understand arrays. Two didn’t understand either. She pulled those groups the same day during independent work time and reteached the exact skill each group was missing using a different method from her initial instruction.
When I first encountered Jamie’s work for the blog, I’ll admit I almost dismissed it. That’s just a math system, I thought. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized that when I was in the classroom, my content had just as many discrete skills that students could misunderstand in specific ways. Sourcing a primary document, distinguishing cause from correlation, explaining change over time, constructing an evidence-based argument. These are skills, not just facts, and a student can master one while completely missing another. The first step was admitting that a mathematical concept and a historical reasoning skill aren’t so different in how students learn them.
Adapting the Tracking Guide for Your Class
What I love about Jamie’s approach, and what I now help teachers implement across content areas, is how transferable her tracking guide is. In my training work, I use a World War I unit as an example. Down the left side of the tracking guide: student initials. Across the top: sub-skills like “identifies long-term causes,” “explains short-term trigger,” “evaluates source bias,” and “connects evidence to claim.” During small-group document work, the teacher watches for errors and jots down notes in real time.
One student might identify militarism, but can’t explain how the alliance system escalated the July Crisis. Another might source a document beautifully but can’t connect the evidence back to their thesis. These are two completely different reteaching needs hiding inside what the old system would have labeled “doesn’t understand WWI.” After class, the teacher spends five minutes analyzing data from the tracking guide and sorts students into reteaching groups based on those specific misconceptions.
Then the teacher pulls them during the warm-up or independent work portion of the next day’s lesson. For a group struggling with the alliance system, the teacher doesn’t re-explain it with the same map and lecture. Instead, they use a different approach entirely: a fictional scenario involving friend groups and a cafeteria conflict that escalates because of pre-existing alliances. Students map the analogy onto the European powers, and suddenly, the domino effect makes sense.
That’s reteaching. Same objective, different method. The good news is that this approach works in a variety of ways across grade levels and content areas.
The research backing this is solid. Jamie’s system draws on work in assessment design by Nicole Vagle, whose book Design in Five: Essential Phases to Create Engaging Assessment Practice outlines how to build such assessments that reveal specific misconceptions rather than just generate scores. The principle holds across content areas: the shorter the feedback loop between misconception and intervention, the more effective the reteaching strategies.
When I train teachers now, I emphasize that you don’t need fancy digital tools. A tracking guide can be a printed table in a binder. Some teachers I work with prefer a clipboard. Others use a Google Sheet. The tool matters less than the habit: look at student work on the day it’s produced, identify the specific misconception, and address it before the next lesson builds on it.
Does this mean every student passes the test after implementing this system? No, but the number of students who fail drops sharply, and the remaining failures are more narrowly defined. Instead of a student bombing the entire unit because they never grasped causation, the teacher can see they understood causation but couldn’t evaluate source bias, so they address that one skill during intervention time.
The old system treated a test score as a verdict. This new method treats misconceptions as information you can act on. That shift alone improves student achievement more than any single lesson plan an effective teacher could write.
What About When Half the Class Bombs the Test?
This still happens sometimes, even with proactive reteaching. When it does, apply the same misconception-based sorting to your test data instead of defaulting to score bands. Using a Cold War unit as an example: as you grade the test, scan for patterns. Did six students all miss questions that required distinguishing between containment in Europe and containment in Asia? That’s a reteach group. Did four English language learners miss questions that relied on understanding Cold War-specific sentence structures and idioms like “iron curtain”? That group needs vocabulary frontloading and visual context, not just content repetition.
Did three students write essays full of accurate facts that never actually answered the prompt? That’s an argumentation skill gap. The right approach is to pull them for the most foundational skill first. A student who finally understands how to evaluate source bias often stops making the downstream errors that looked like separate problems.
When you’re looking at a large number of students who missed benchmark scores, break them into misconception-based subgroups rather than one large reteach group. In a Cold War unit, a teacher might run two or three reteaching sessions at once: one group working on distinguishing among containment policies, another on evaluating primary-source bias, a third on constructing thesis statements. This is much more manageable than trying to address fifteen different gaps by reteaching the whole class the same way. Small-group instruction targeted to misconceptions is a great option when the alternative is a whole-class review that bores half the room and confuses the other half.
Sometimes a student shows up in multiple reteach groups. That’s fine. Pull them for the most basic level skill first. I learned this the hard way as a new teacher, when I’d keep a student at my desk for thirty minutes trying to close every gap at once. We’d both leave frustrated. Now I tell teachers: pick the prerequisite skill, reteach it with hands-on materials or a completely new approach, and watch what happens. Often, the other gaps start to close on their own once the foundational piece is in place.
What I’d Actually Do
If I walked back into a high school history classroom tomorrow, I’d build this tracking system during the first week of school. Not the first week of the first unit. The first week of the year. The rhythm of jotting misconception notes during small groups takes practice, and I’d rather get the clunky phase out of the way when the content is still introductory and the stakes are low. The first thing I’d establish is my classroom procedures for independent work, because this system falls apart if the rest of the class can’t function without you.
I’d also be honest with students about what I’m doing. In my early years, I thought reteaching had to feel seamless, like students shouldn’t know they were being pulled for extra help. That was a mistake. When I started saying, “I noticed a few of you got stuck on the same thing yesterday, and I want to explain it a different way,” student engagement in those reteaching sessions improved immediately.
They knew the reteach group wasn’t punishment. It was just me acknowledging that my first explanation didn’t land for everyone.
Here’s what this system won’t do. It won’t magically give you more time. If you have students who enter your classroom multiple grade levels behind, this method won’t close that gap in one semester. What it will do is stop you from wasting the reteaching minutes you do have on skills students already understand or on methods that already failed. Most teachers I work with tell me the single biggest frustration with reteaching is the sense that they’re spinning their wheels. This system ends that feeling because you always know exactly what you’re targeting and why. You spend less time guessing and more time addressing the actual problem.
One more thing: this works across content areas. I’ve now helped English, science, and elementary teachers adapt Jamie’s framework, but it requires a classroom culture where students can work independently while you pull reteach groups. If you’re still building that culture, start small. Pull one group for eight minutes. Build stamina gradually. Build it slowly, and be transparent with students the whole time. Those first two weeks of establishing classroom procedures are an investment that pays off all year.
What’s your current approach to reteaching? Are you still sorting by test scores, or have you found a different way to catch misconceptions earlier? Drop a comment below to help others brainstorm ideas that could work for them, too.
How do I find time to reteach when I can barely get through the content the first time?
You don’t find extra time. You change what happens during the time you already have. When I train teachers to replace whole-class review with targeted small group instruction during independent work or warm-up time, they consistently report gaining instructional minutes because fewer individual students need full intervention later. You’re making what’s already on your plate more precise.
What’s the difference between reviewing and reteaching?
Reviewing is going back over new content using the same explanation and method you used the first time. Reteaching means identifying the specific misconception and teaching the concept through a completely different approach. During an Industrial Revolution unit, reviewing means reexplaining why industrialization began in Britain, using the same notes. Reteaching means realizing students can’t visualize the geographic factors, pulling up photographs of British coal deposits, and having them physically map the resources before connecting each one to a specific industry. Same learning objective. Different strategies entirely.
What if I have too many students who need to be retaught in small groups?
When you’re facing a large group of students who missed the benchmark, break them into misconception-based subgroups rather than one large reteach group. During a Cold War unit, a teacher might run three reteaching sessions simultaneously: one on containment policies, another on evaluating primary-source bias, and a third on thesis construction. This is a great way to keep groups manageable. Prioritize the most foundational misconception and tackle that with the largest subgroup first.
How do I track misconceptions without spending my whole planning period on data entry?
Use a paper tracking guide with student initials and key skills across the top, with a small notes section. Fill it in during or immediately after your small-group work, while students are still with you. I tried digital tools in the classroom, and they always took longer because I had to switch tabs and type. A clipboard with a printed sheet took me two or three minutes per group. The tracking guide in the resource library minimizes writing time while capturing the misconception itself, not just a score.
Does this approach work for high school when I only see students for 50 minutes?
Yes, from direct experience. The structure shifts slightly: your exit ticket or misconception notes happen during the last few minutes of class, you sort students after school, and you pull reteach groups during the warm-up or independent work of the next day. The feedback loop stretches to about 24 hours instead of same-day, but the misconception-based grouping still works. I used this approach for years on a traditional period schedule before I left the classroom.
What do I do with the rest of the class while I’m pulling reteach groups?
In my history classroom, the rest of the class worked on a structured task that didn’t require my direct help: a primary source analysis with guiding questions, a short written response, or practice document-based questions. I taught clear routines in the first two weeks for working with a small group, including what to do if they finished early and how to quietly ask a peer for help without interrupting my table. A re-engagement lesson or a variety of activities at different stations is a great option here. Those procedures took about ten school days to establish and were worth every minute.
This post was originally published on February 1, 2019, and contributed to by Jamie Jasperson, founder of Basic Girl Teaches. She teaches 4th-grade math and Science in Texas and is known for her easy-to-use, no-fluff resources. She is the founder of The Teacher Instagram Club, a free community that helps teacherpreneurs use Instagram to grow their businesses or brands. You can connect with Jamie on Instagram or email her at basicgirlteaches@gmail.com
