Image courtesy of Geoff Duncan on Flickr.com

I don’t know about you, but I can’t believe we only have three more teaching weeks until the end of the semester!  It seems like CTLT’s Faculty Prep Week was just wrapping up.

Whether you are frantic about trying to finish everything in those short weeks or are limping along and have the minutes counted until you turn in your grades (oh, wait, that was faculty at a different institution where I worked…), you might want to give some thought as to how you will elegantly wrap up the semester.

Resist the urge to use the remaining time available to cram as much information into the class as possible.  We all roll our eyes when students cram for an exam because we know crammed-learning is not very effective in the long-run.  So, if cramming isn’t a good study strategy, it also isn’t a very good teaching strategy.

Instead, finish your course by helping your students look back at all that they’ve learned during the semester and how it fits into the big picture of their education and their lives.  For example, you can ask students to

  • Bring an object to class that best represents what they’ve learned in the course
  • Create concept maps showing how what they’ve learned relates
  • Create a portfolio of the work they’ve completed during the semester and write a reflective paper where they review their work and what it has taught them
  • Discuss critical moments (highlights, insights, surprises, etc.) either in small groups or as a whole class

All too often, we assume students know why we have set up the course the way we have.  Because all of the interrelationships make sense to us, we forget that our students don’t have the same level of sophistication in how they organize content knowledge…yet.  Wrapping up the course with one of these strategies will help them organize their knowledge and make it useful for them in the long term.

From a purely selfish point of view, watching the “I learned all of that this semester?” light bulb go off with students is a pretty darn satisfying experience and makes all of the angst spent on students worthwhile.

For Further Exploration:

A Strong Ending to the Semester (PDF of strategies compiled by The Faculty Center for Excellence in Teaching at Western Kentucky University)

Managing the End of the Semester

CTLT’s Little Ideas for Teaching #5: Ending the Semester: Individual and Group Activities