"I'm Making Perfect Sense..."

"...you're just not keeping up," The Doctor.

Have you ever felt that way?  You teach a skill to the best of your knowledge and the kids just don't get it?  You try all you know to try, to no avail.  We need to adopt the philosophy of the Jedi Master Yoda.
"You must unlearn what you have learned...try not! Only do or do not! There is no try."

A few years ago, simply teaching the skill was enough.  You covered the objective, marked it off the list and moved on to the next topic or chapter.  

Now we need a different mentality, and many of us are already there. We should compare the teach vs. learn philosophies of education. Every concept you cover needs to be scrutinized, and we need to ask ourselves if the students really learned the idea behind what we were teaching. We can teach and lecture until we turn blue, but if the kids don't get it what good have we done?  To see if they get it, we test then teach again.  Often the second time around is just the same song, different verse, and if they don't get it the second time we give up. This is the same as talking louder and slower to someone that speaks a different language.  What we really need is an interpreter to help us out. 

This is when having other teachers on your team comes in handy.  You can look at each objective, review the data from your assessments and determine who was most successful on each topic.  Figure out what they did differently and emulate their teaching. This doesn't mean you become their clone, but you find out what she did differently that worked.  

If you are able to implement some of her techniques and make gains with your students, make note of what you did differently and use it the next time you teach the objective.  In some cases, you can regroup your students during an intervention time and have that successful teacher work with the students that are still struggling. This works better if you have a few different topics requiring intervention because each teacher can take a different group and skill to teach during that time of intervention.  

You will also have a group for the students that already get it and don't need time for intervention.  For these students I would have them in some form of enrichment. Who teaches this enrichment class?  The person whose students were the least successful on the previous topics or objectives.
What do they do with these kids during this time?  Whatever you do with them has to be engaging, and rewarding.  If it is more work for the student, they will have no incentive to succeed.  If it is active and engaging, but doesn't seem like it is more work they will thrive and work harder to stay in that group. They activities you do with these students should promote critical thinking or creativity in the students.  As a teacher, you might be tempted to put in a movie for the kids to watch.  Aside from the obvious copyright violations, this is probably an indication of why you didn't succeed in the first place.   These students need to continue to grow and not vegetate.  Never should a movie be used to babysit these students.
If you as a teacher are making the decision to waste the valuable time and money invested in you to watch movies with your students that have little to no educational value and cannot be related back to instruction, you might want to look for another line of work.  As an instructional leader, I can hire an assistant to babysit the kids and get a lot more bang for my buck.

What happens when they still don't get it?  If this is on a single topic you can try again for remediation.  If it seems to be a chronic problem, if they struggle with every objective after intervention you might want to seek other forms of help.  It may be time to refer the student for special services.

Remember, the goal is not to teach (try) but that students learn (do).