Introduction
can’t!—then they must empower students to be masters of their own learning. However, students receiving poor or failing marks on their work—and, by extension, their class grade—is only one piece of a bigger problem. Unfortunately, a common method teachers use to avoid addressing student failure is to simply avoid giving failing grades at all costs. While the retakes and redos might help alleviate those failing grades, do they really support improvement in students’ process, products, and progress? One has to wonder if all of the retaking, redoing, and so on are merely steps taken to forego an administrative showdown. After all, if the student is failing, the inquiry begins with the teacher, not with the student. Throughout my career, I often see this disturbing trend in grading. When students fail a graded assignment or an assessment, teachers simply allow a redo or retake. Although this gives students the opportunity to raise their grade, it raises an important question: In doing the redoing and retaking, how can teachers ensure students aren’t simply going through the motions to get a better grade by memorizing previous content without necessarily mastering the learning standards? To avoid this, teachers often write a new assessment for students to retake, or they might assign a new essay topic for students to write. These approaches require hours of work on teachers’ part, work that could be spent creating new process-focused learning opportunities or determining new scaffolds to support students through a setback or obstacle. Many teachers require students to be caught up with their homework before they are allowed a retake or a redo. This step can help ensure students take a more active part in overcoming a learning challenge, but does that get to the root of the question: How can teachers create opportunities where those redos or retakes are part of the learning process and not simply implemented as a way for students to play catchup with their learning? Another route schools and teachers often take to avoid poor grades from showing up in a gradebook or report card is for teachers to meet with students before, during, or after school in individual conferences to help students make up or redo work. Many large districts have after-school tutoring labs where content-area teachers facilitate learning well into the dinner hour, Saturday classes when students can make up late work, or credit-recovery classes after school and in the summer in which students attend an abridged version of a course—often just a couple of weeks—to make up a quarter’s or semester’s worth of learning. Such efforts can be effective, but they often place the onus on teachers to get students to pass the class, abdicating students’ role in their own learning. Thus, the question remains: Are students truly mastering the learning, or are they merely regurgitating information that has barely been digested?
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