How do we respond when a student fails?

How do we respond when a student fails?

If your school has made the jump to PLCs, essential questions, enduring understandings and understanding by design, you’ve certainly heard this question before. As educators we’re tasked with asking and answering questions: What do we want students to learn, how will we know when they have learned it and how will we respond when they do not?

I often wonder where the balance is between those three questions. We can spend months in curriculum writing meetings, deciding what we want our students to learn and how we are going to teach them. PLC after PLC we look at data from exams, both formative and standardized, to determine what students have learned. And yet the third question, how will we respond, is often hidden away in some dark storage closet.

When you think about it, the educational system that we live and work in does a fantastic job of supporting the first two questions. Summer provides us with ample time to review and revise curriculum. June, July and August can provide us with undistracted time to reflect on our practice and still allow time for rejuvenation. Many districts build in a weekly PLC for teachers to analyze data. This time is also spent crafting SMART goals and collecting new data. But when do we address our struggling learners?

We know there are students who are failing, despite our curriculum revisions. We know they are failing because the data we’ve collected and reviewed during PLC time shows they are failing. It seems that as soon as we have collected data, the lesson, unit or semester is over and we are ready for the next page of our lesson plans. We’re ready to move on even if our students are not.

This week the semester ended at my school and failure notices were due by noon on Monday. That technically gave me three hours before the end of the workday and the start of the new semester. Is three hours enough time to reflect on what happened with those students who failed? Or to come up with a plan to get them back on track? No.

Today the new semester started and with it a new set of lessons, time demands and data to begin collecting. We are asked to push on to what’s next while yesterday’s failures are still cooling. The time and content demands on our schools are so great that in order to get everything in we can’t allow ourselves to slow down. However, when we fail to slow down we often leave students behind.

The student who fails a test or quiz during lesson one is at a disadvantage for lesson two. A student who fails a semester gets a statistical reset at the start of a new semester, but their knowledge base is starting in a hole, making that reset a minuet point. The student who fails a full year of school loses more than time, they lose self confidence and self worth.

The summer months of the school year allow teachers to reflect on failures, but that only helps next year’s students, not the ones who will be moving on to a different classroom. Those students deserve to benefit from the improvements to your teaching as well.

As teachers and administrators we fight for our prep periods and PLCs, we need to fight equally as hard to answer the question, how will we respond when they fail. We need to advocate for time spent learning best practices and how to differentiate. We need to value tutoring opportunities and academic supports built into the school day. We need to develop programs to support all students, even our tier two and three RTI kids.

It starts your classroom, the hallways and the staff lounge. It starts by building time into your schedule to ask hard questions and take action if you don’t like the answers you’re getting. Have conversations with your colleagues; share your struggles and learn from their experiences. Curriculum writing and data collection don’t happen in isolation and neither should supporting struggling students.

I encourage you to take the time now to look at your struggling students. If they’ve failed once don’t allow them to fail again without trying something new. Every child can learn. For some it comes easily for others it is hard work, on their part and yours. But I promise you there is something out there that works for every student. You just need to find it.