As the end of a semester approaches, I always have this vision that my students and I will spend our last day of class reminiscing about what a terrific time we had and sharing war stories. We’ll drink some coffee, have some laughs, and then the students will give me a hug or a pat on the back on the way out, promising to keep in touch.
What usually happens instead is that they fill out the course evaluations, I review the final exam for them or answer questions about the final paper assignment, and then I stand behind my desk watching them leave class 20 minutes after they arrived. Some of them wave goodbye or thank me, but mostly we are all just too tired at that point to do much beyond be grateful that it’s almost over.
Still, I know better. I know that the final days of a course can be a fruitful time to help students process what they have learned and to reinforce the most important ideas or skills they have (I hope) acquired in their time with me.
I also know that many of us hand out the course evaluations on the final day of the semester, and that coupling that activity with some inspired pedagogical exercise helps put students in a positive frame of mind when they are filling out the forms. Since student evaluations help determine the fates of so many of us, I’m all for nudging students in the right direction whenever possible.
Perhaps most important, though, I know that by the last day of the semester I don’t have a whole lot of gas left in my tank, so as much as I would like to finish my class on the contemporary British novel by staging an interpretive dance version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, it just ain’t gonna happen.
With the end of the semester right on top of us, and most of you probably just about to hold the final class, I thought the ideal topic would be a review of good ideas on how to finish strong. How can you close with a rousing and intellectually inspiring class that doesn’t require a ton of planning or energy?
I went looking in the usual literature for essays about the topic, and pored over my little library of teaching guidebooks, but didn’t find much on the subject.
So I turned instead to The Chronicle’s forums, where I posted a request for people to describe their best ideas for the final class of the semester. Only a handful of responses came back, evidence perhaps that most people do what I usually do on the final day of the semester -- i.e., clean up administrative tasks, let the students go early, and then go back to my office and sink into my chair with a sigh of relief.
Not everyone does that, though. One of the first posters to respond, a faculty member who teaches Latin American history, made no secret of the link between pleasing students on the final day of class and the course evaluations -- he (I assume the poster is a “he” given his moniker: larryc) organizes a potluck meal of Latin dishes, and then hands out the course evaluations.
I usually bring in doughnut holes or leftover Halloween candy once a semester on a day when students are doing presentations or reading essays aloud, but I have to say feeding them on the day of the evaluations strikes me as a bit too Machiavellian, even for my tastes.
The remaining posters also gave me some ideas, which I’ve sorted into two categories. The first set of ideas involves having students reflect upon, and articulate, what they have learned throughout the semester. I do a version of that myself in some classes, though with less frequency than I would like. But when I do use it, I find it to be a powerful tool to help reinforce the major themes and skills of the course.
Using that technique can be very simple in small classes of 25 students or fewer. Ask them to write down -- on a piece of paper that you can collect for a final quiz grade -- the three most important ideas or concepts they learned, or skills they developed. Give them 10 minutes to write, and then either let a few volunteers share what they have written or ask everyone to pick one of their three items and explain it to the class. The more people you can get to contribute, and the more varied the answers, the more students will begin to see how much they have learned.
You can vary that format in all kinds of ways -- have students do the writing but no discussion, the discussion without the writing, or come up with ideas in small groups, and so on. The only requirement is that all student have the opportunity to articulate in some form, written or oral, which lessons have been most important for them over the course of the semester.
Talking about those ideas one last time will not only help the students remember them, it will alsogive you valuable information about whether students are learning what you want them to learn.
My variation of that exercise builds upon an information sheet I have the students fill out on the first day of the class that asks them to identify what they hope to learn. On the last day, I hand back those sheets and ask them to tell me whether they fulfilled their hopes, or learned something new altogether.
If your institution’s course evaluations ask any kinds of questions about how much or whether the students learned in the course, this exercise certainly primes the pump. It reminds them that, despite what they may have felt when they were sitting comatose through one of your lectures, they learned something.
One poster suggested an interesting variation on that technique: Have students write a letter to the people who will be taking the class in the next semester, giving them advice about how to do well in the course. That exercise, the poster wrote, offered “a good way for us to synthesize the things they’d learned in the class, and it gave the students a chance to reflect on how far they’d come, and how much more confident they were.”
The second set of ideas focused on using the final day of class to demonstrate to students how their newly acquired skills and knowledge can help them in the world beyond the course, and even beyond college. Maybe you have been reminding them about that all along, but the final day can be reserved for a lesson that really drives the point home.
One poster, who teaches a course in media studies, finishes by having the students watch an episode of the sort of television show they watch already -- The Office or Family Guy -- and asks them to take the analytic skills they developed that semester and wield them on those popular shows. Every student writes a brief response to the program, and then makes a comment or contribution to the final discussion.
Another poster talked about reserving the last day for a demonstration of “relevance.” Through both writing and discussion, this faculty member asks students to think about how the material of the course might prove relevant to their lives in the future: “If the class is small enough (say 25 or under), I leave enough time that we actually go around in a circle and everyone has to say at least a few words about their personal experience of ‘relevance’ related to the class. It really ends the semester on a positive (and reflective) note, on a number of levels.”
The success of any those exercises depends, in part, upon having a small class in which everyone can raise his or her voice over the span of a normal course session. Larger classes might have to be restricted to the written portion of an exercise, or to discussions in which participation is more selective. Still, both options seem better to me than doing nothing at all.
The thread on this topic remains open, so if you’re sitting at your desk and fuming because you have been wowing students for years in the final class of the semester with some brilliant pedagogical innovation, and it didn’t get mentioned in this column, head over The Chronicle’s forums, visit the “In the Classroom” topic, and scroll down for the thread on “Ideas for Final Day of Class.” Enlighten us.
While you’re surfing around, trying to steel yourself for the tidal wave of end-of-semester grading that’s about to crash down upon you, visit this month’s recommendation for pedagogical resources, Tomorrow’s Professor, Rick Reis’s Web site and e-mail discussion group on teaching and higher education. “Desktop faculty development,” Reis calls it, “one hundred times a year.”
If you join the discussion group, you’ll receive e-mail messages twice a week that offer reflections or analysis of higher education, or research and tips on teaching and learning. Many of the messages are excerpts or chapters from new books on teaching and higher education; some are written exclusively for the list. All of the postings are archived at the Tomorrow’s Professor Web site, and many of them offer very concrete suggestions for handling specific classroom activities and situations.
Finally and perhaps most important, enjoy your break.
James M. Lang is an associate professor of English at Assumption College and author of Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons From the First Year (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). He writes about teaching in higher education and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com