Finishing Classes and Making Transitions

One of the things I’m working on most consciously in my teaching is finishing each class session in a way that ties the day’s lessons and activities together and reiterates key points. I should say up front that most of my class meetings follow this rough pattern: Introductory remarks about what we’ll do that day; a mini-lecture on an important concept (usually explained or illustrated in the previous night’s reading); an activity that gets students discussing or putting into practice the concept covered in the mini-lecture; concluding remarks of some kind. The day’s activity runs the gamut from plenary discussions to citing cereal boxes to identifying the claims and evidence in a ridiculous or good televised argument, but too often I end up stretching it till nearly the end of class. So I'll rush a few concluding remarks trying to tie everything together, or I'll get in a fairly satisfying mini-lecture that concludes things, but only rarely so it isn't a regular feature of the course. What I'd like is for students to expect it, and to expect it as something that’s worth paying attention to even though they’re itching to leave.

I think this concluding move is important for several obvious reasons. First and foremost, the connections between concepts and practice that are clear to us as teachers are not always clear to students, either because we’ve failed to convincingly make them, or because students weren’t paying attention, or something else in between. Also a strong conclusion is a kind of reflection on the practice of learning, something that’s been shown to give ideas and skills a better chance of sticking and of being transferred out of our classes into other contexts, like jobs, personal lives, or other courses. And conclusions are just another type of transition, because ideally one day’s conclusion has a big enough hook that you can grab it and attach it to the next class’s introductory remarks, forming a seamless line of teaching brilliance. Ideally.

But transitions are tough. You work hard to build momentum in discussions and activities, but rarely does that momentum exhaust itself (if you’ve created it at all) at exactly the right moment, and on exactly the right note, that you don’t have to make a purposeful statement connecting it with the next thing. I’m interested in anything anyone’s done that works to smooth out transitions or make conclusions feel conclusive.

I don’t want to make it sound as though my class meetings end badly or that the concepts and skills I teach don’t stick. The reflective writing that students do throughout the semester shows that they are indeed learning, and my course evaluations show that they are, by and large, enjoying my course’s content and structure. But, admitting that teaching is hard and we’re always trying to get better at it, conclusions and transitions have been on my mind.

I emailed some teacher friends and they sent some good ideas. My colleague GL has his students do some reflective writing at the end of class, whether it's freewriting, responding to a prompt, or jotting down questions they might have about the day's lesson. I like how this upends my assumption that the end of class is all about the teacher telling students what they should have absorbed; as in every other facet of teaching, doing together is better than telling at. Another colleague, SS, also uses writing, but in her case it's to get students crafting a quick thesis statement pertinent to what they did that day or to an upcoming assignment, or doing reflective writing that functions as a daily quiz. RF takes the mini-lecture approach, doing it with enough consistency that he feels students both expect and value it, while MH does something participatory but still fairly traditional: she poses that biggest of all big questions for student writers: "So what?" Why does what we did today matter? How is it significant in the context of this class, and in what other contexts is it useful? DD draws a diagram of the writing process to show students where they've been, where they are, and where they're going, a kind of "you are here" orientation that shows students their movement through the semester. Then, DD says, he gives them a loud "Bye!" (which I know from having heard it is heavy on the "eeeee!") and grins until they depart. That's a nice concluding move: unique, personal, and a clear signal that class is over.