What happens during the last five minutes of your class? Do students pack up early and form a line at the door like they’re waiting to board a Southwest Airlines flight? Does the bell ring mid-activity as you shout out some final reminders and students sprint toward the door?
If you’re not using the last few minutes of class to its fullest potential, you’re missing out on some opportunities for powerful learning. MASTER teachers can use this handy acronym to plan intentionally to end class powerfully.
Metacognition
Wrapping up class with a metacognitive reflection—whole-class or individual—can help students reflect on what they learned and how they learned it. When students explain their thinking, they reinforce strategies for success. For instance, after a lesson during which students struggled together to solve a tricky problem or to work their way through a piece of challenging text, you could call a quick class meeting to debrief the day’s lesson by having the class brainstorm the strategies they used to overcome the difficulty. The resulting list of how to approach a complex problem or decipher a dense piece of writing can become an anchor chart on display for future reference. Students can look over to the anchor chart for some tips when they next encounter challenges.
Assess
It only takes a few minutes at the end of class to collect a bit of formative data that can help drive future instruction and interactions with your students Ask students to answer a question or two on an exit ticket and hand it to you on the way out the door. Give them a quick quiz using your favorite digital tool to see what they know. See if students can explain a key idea from the lesson or—better yet—answer the day’s Essential Question in a few sentences. Collecting tiny bits of info from each student allows you to see which students have mastery and who needs more help. You can also design a formative assessment that gives students immediate feedback on their own learning; that way, you won’t be the only one who knows whether some reteaching or further practice is called for.
Summarize
Recapping the major ideas from the lesson reinforces the main points, providing the kind of repetition that makes learning stick. Research shows that summarizing is one of the most powerful strategies in helping student learn. A 25-word GIST statement about the day’s lesson, a two- or three-sentence summary on a notecard, or an oral summary on a digital tool such as Flipgrid makes students separate the important ideas from the minutia. Pro tip: Though it’s much easier and quicker to summarize learning for your students, having them summarize themselves yields a bigger payoff. I’m a big fan of a paired summary: turn and explain the main ideas of today’s lesson to your neighbor. Then call on some neighbors to recap what they heard for the entire class.
Teaser
I know I’m late to the game, but I’m currently listening to the Serial podcast. Each episode ends with an exciting hint about what new aspects of the mystery will be uncovered in the next installment. Fortunately, I don’t have to wait a week like the original listeners did because after I hear the teaser, my appetite is eager for what comes next. Savvy teachers know the power of the provocative preview. Tempting students with a bit of trivia, a cliffhanging question, or the promise of something exciting in tomorrow’s lesson will tap into their natural curiosity and have them thinking about your subject after they leave the room. Who knows? Some may even do a little reading ahead or research on their own to find out more before they return to class.
Emphasize
Talk show host Jerry Springer always took a moment at the end of the insanity of each show to address the audience with a final thought, a piece of wisdom that gave a “so what” to whatever madness his viewers had endured for the preceding hour. Emphasizing a takeaway was Springer’s way of sending his viewers off with something they could use in their lives. The same strategy can be an effective part of your class closure routine. With so much intense learning happening in your room, some students may have a hard time discerning the difference between the nice-to-know and the need-to-know. The final moments of class give you the opportunity to draw attention to big takeaways from the lesson, to clarify points of confusion, and to send your students forth into the world with a significant idea to remember.
Reflect
How do we improve if we never stop to think about how to improve? Self-reflection is one of the most important and most overlooked aspects of education. Most students, after leaving your classroom, won’t give your subject a second thought until they see you next time. They certainly aren’t going to look up from their game of Fortnite and think, “You know, I didn’t revise my essay very well thoroughly today in English class, so tomorrow I will probably want to devote some time to look at sentence variety in my paper.” The last few minutes of class is the perfect time to switch gears and shift into reflective mode. I love the Plus/Delta Reflection: students reflect on what they know or did well from the learning experience (that’s the plus) and then on how they need to grow or change going forward (the Delta). You could also ask students to set a short-term goal for next class, write down what they did well and one thing they want to work on, answer specific questions about how they learned or performed, give themselves a numerical rating, write a note to the teacher about what’s going well and where they need help, or complete a sentence stem that asks them to reflect on their progress. Revisiting the reflection the next day is a perfect way to begin a new day of learning.
Stop wasting the waning moments of class. Wring every drop of learning out of your lessons by incorporating effective lesson closure. A little prior planning (and remembering to set a reminder alarm) is all it takes to add an extra step that makes the learning sizzle rather than fizzle.
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