A Delicate Balance: Retakes and Responsibility

I recently heard a conversation between two parents of Middle School students.  They were discussing that their children are allowed to do retakes.  They were concerned that their children were not learning responsibility.  In the conversation, they pointed out that in their jobs, they were not allowed to be late or have retakes.

Their concern is valid, responsibility is a key trait any employer is going to want.  While most jobs don't fire you for one mistake, the overall point can still be made that responsibility is equal to many academic skills students obtain in school.

It is critical to understand a key difference between learning and the workplace. In the workplace, the objectives vary based on the type of work being done.  Often the objective may be customer service and therefore timeliness is critical. However, in school, the objective is going to be learning the content standard or learning goal.  Therefore, we must be precise in our assessment.  Lumping responsibility and content knowledge into the same assessment can make the results messy.  Using Kindergarten as an example, let's say we have a learning goal that students must count to ten.  If a student is unable to count to 10 but can count to 3, we don't simply grade the student with a 30%, reprimand the student for not being a responsible learner, and then move on to the next standard of counting by twos.  Counting to ten is a building block in the student's learning.  Therefore, we continue to practice until we can get to ten.

Using the Kindergarten example is a simplistic way of looking at learning.  However, it is true of other learning as well.  In Middle School, it is critical that the learner takes responsibility for their work.  The student needs to show evidences of learning between the first attempt at the assessment and the second attempt.  This means additional, meaningful, work.  If a course has 9 essential learnings in an 18 week semester, clearly they are going to be having several assessments.  It is in the student's best interest to do their best to perform at the highest level on the first attempt of learning.  However, if they simply struggle to "get it," we would be doing the student a disservice by saying "as a school district, we determined this to be an essential part of your education, but since you didn't understand it on October 14th, we will simply no longer hold you accountable for it."  Instead, we insist on learning and we expect that the responsibility of that learning falls on the student with support from the teacher. Both academic content and responsibility are of primary concern but assessed separately.