After three months of winter coldness, t’s the final week of term here at Waterloo, although there is a little stub of it left on Monday, I’m pretty much done teaching today.
I’ve had a harder than expected term, and I know my students are pushed to their limits, too. So I’m trying something new this year, a reflective and possibly even graceful way to wind down the term without cancelling class or generally goofing around. I’m taking some time to create the space for students to tie a bow around their own learning, together with each other and with me. I’m also using these last few classes to prepare students for exams.
I offer this for discussion, two classes I’m teaching right now and two different strategies for Ending the Terms in a Meaningful Way Beyond Dragging My Ass Across the Finish Line (TM). This is what week 12 of teaching looks like, according to my experiment.
First year course:
They have a final exam, as well as a paper, so I’m trying to help them use class time to do both those things, in a productive way.
Exercise: in-class draft workshop a week before the paper is due. This was a soft-landing from binge-writing at the last minute. A full week before it was due, they had a complete first draft, and they read each other’s work using a rubric designed from the way that I would eventually grade the papers, so they learned about what was important, and how I grade, and how hard it is to give good feedback to people. I sat at the front and answered content questions, reference questions, format questions.
Exercise: I give students the exam skeleton. There’s a section for terms and definitions, so I make them collectively brainstorm 50 relevant terms from the course. I’ll choose 15, they’ll define 10. There’s a section on technology history, so I make them brainstorm as many historical questions they can think of and how they relate to the course as a whole. There’s a section on approaches and theories, so I make them brainstorm all the different academic approaches to new media we’ve studies.
Exercise: The last quiz of the term concerns the Big Scary Essay Question on the exam, which will be to perform some kind of analysis on a news story about new media. So what they have to do to get full marks on the quiz, is find a news story about new media, and tell me why it would be a good one to use on the exam. I’ll then choose the top five and share those on the last day, and pick one for the exam itself.
What I love about this is that all this brainstorming can be done by riffling through the books and notes from the term, can be done on the fly, requires no prep from any of us, and consitutes a really good study session. I love as well that it gets us all, as a class, and together, to go over and review the material from the entire term. It’s a great use of class time, that doesn’t overwhelm any one. Show up, get something of value for doing it in real time. It’s worth coming, AND we tie the semester up with a bow.
BONUS: my students have effectively produced the first draft of the exam for me. I’m literally picking the actual questions and terms from the one’s they put together in class. I won’t have to spend more than 20 minutes putting the final together. That’s a classic win-win, is what that is.
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Fourth year course
There’s no exam, and they’re busy finishing their papers, so I suspect that assigning them a lot of new reading at the end of term is frustrating and fruitless. So I did these things instead.
Exercise: Reflective writing, taking the expressed learning outcomes of the class from the syllabus, and assessing if and how we have met those goals, detailing assignments and readings and exercises that contributed to learning.
Exercise: Reflective writing, answering the following four questions: Most valuable thing learned, Most surprising thing learned, Most counterintuitive thing learned, Most wrong thing learned. This prompts them to review the whole of the semester and to rank and evaluate the ideas presented. They then made groups of three and shared ideas, then I made a Google doc and let people populate it in a discussion. We had a really good chat, and it was great feedback for me on the course design, actually.
Exercise: For the last day of class, when they are handing in their papers and photography projects, each student will take 2-4 minutes to present a brief abstract or example to their classmates. Why should I be the only who knows what great and diverse ideas they’re all working on?
BONUS: I have a lot of grading in hand right now, and these types of classes take zero prep, which gives me more time to finish the grading quickly.
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As I teach these classes in these ways, I’m noting how good I feel about it. Not gloating over the lack of prep, but really enjoying this group process of processing the whole term, together, collaboratively. Taking a bit of time to see how where we’ve ended up is different from where we started, what we know now is different from then, how our skills have developed over time. We see where we fit, what we have done and what we have left to do. Celebrating our accomplishments and looking forward. I’m going to do this again.
Do you have end of term wrap up activities that work in your classes? I’d love to hear about them.
Hook & Eye 
I'm a TA, so I don't get that much input into larger lecture and exam structure. But I usually have a tutorial session where we talk about exam studying and writing strategies. Depending on what the exam is, I get students to create study sheets that will help. For example, one year the students had to write short and long essays that compared and contrasts different forms of modern theatre. So I got students into small groups to list 10 most important points of different forms of theatre they learned (I tell them to bring their course materials and notes into the class ahead of time for reference) and assigned one person per group to email those points to me later that day, I collected them and circulated them to students via email. Meanwhile, in class each group presented some of those points (usually performatively) to the rest of the class. After the presentations were done, I asked questions about how students might do a compare and contrast based on the information students presented. That way students observed and practiced comparing and contrasting together, and they also got a study sheet that they can add to and practice writing with at home! 🙂 I borrowed and modified it a bit from what some of my undergraduate teachers did.
Megan Davies
Theatre and Performance Studies PhD student
York University
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