Maintaining Student Engagement Through the End of the Year
Hey Coach,
It’s that time of year when my students are ready for summer, but I still have to teach and assess. What can I do to meet both objectives without losing my mind?
Sincerely,
Overwhelmed in Ohio
Hi, Overwhelmed!
Great question! As a former high school teacher, I can attest with certainty that the way teachers approach the end of the year and their students' expectations for what happens in that same time period vary widely. How can we maintain student engagement through the very last day? How can we make sure that even though grading is coming to an end, our work still has value? I want to share three practical approaches to engaging your students at any grade level through the end of the year.
Do a review board game project.
Who says review can't be fun? And who says you have to be the one creating all of it? As you look back over the year, consider the units or topics that your class has explored. Have collaborative student groups sign up for a topic where they are in charge of review. They can use an existing board game to model their rules or even paste on top of a physical game to create one that reviews their topic. Or, go digital and have them create their games in PowerPoint or Google Slides using clickable hyperlinks. (For one example of how this can be done, check out this Digital Board Game template from Slidesmania!) Either way, students are getting a good review while having fun as they create and play games.
Create a personalized final exam or passion project.
How often do students get to explore something they’re truly interested in? It's certainly rare. For my final exam one year, I had students read a book that was on their level and told them I would be testing on all those books. They were mystified about how I could do such a test, but I gave them just keywords on their study guides. On the day of the final exam, the students got a graphic organizer where they had to tell me about different themes, character elements, or plot points in the book. I was an ELA teacher, but this thought process could be adapted into any kind of passion project. Students can hone in on a topic of interest and study it deeply-- it might be a book they want to read, a topic they want to research, a skill they want to learn, or a "math/social studies/science in the real world" project where students explore examples of course concepts in their real life. In any of these scenarios, student choice and voice interplay with academic content. It's a win-win.
Use carousel presentations to have students share work they’ve created and increase your own grading efficiency.
Instead of having the whole class “sit and get” while each classmate takes a turn presenting out loud, have students present to each other in small groups and even evaluate each other on an unnumbered rubric. You float from group to group to facilitate, but your good feedback comes from the consensus of what other students notice via the rubric.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed at the end of the year. After all, there are final grades to put in, promotion scenarios to review, and celebrations of every stripe. However, with just these three easy ideas, you and your students can finish with a little bit of purposeful fun!
All the best,
Coach
