The end of the school year is not only on the horizon, it—like a sunset in full glory—has become the horizon. And if you are like me, these waning days where all eyes fix upon the horizon can be a challenge. Suddenly, issues with work completion and engagement sprout where there were no issues before; countless end of the year ceremonies, activities, and celebrations arise to compete for bandwidth; and the overall level of work that has been building all year up to this point inevitably dips a bit. 

These issues pop up in May with the same regularity as the tulips and daffodils in my yard, and yet, even sixteen years in, they always catch me a bit by surprise (which is probably why I’ve written about them before; see here and here). 

In the last few years though, I’ve finally found an approach to teaching in May that has helped me to do more with these final weeks. Its genesis, like so many good teaching ideas, is admittedly a bit odd though. I didn’t learn about it from a book or conference; the idea came from a student mural in my school of a quote that is generally attributed to Maya Angelou*:

A couple springs ago, on a May morning, I glanced at the mural and had a sudden realization that it held at least a partial answer to my late-year issues. To understand why, let’s think for a moment about how memory works: We are designed to forget far more than we remember. And the things we forget the most are the things we don’t revisit multiple times in multiple different learning sessions. These memory basics are why retrieval practice and spacing are so important, but they also point to what makes May so frustrating: When the number of learning sessions grows few, finding time to revisit and retrieve grows difficult, and thus to paraphrase the quote, our students grow more likely to forget what we say and do. 

And so, as I mulled over things in that moment, I realized that my approach at the end of the year needed to be less about cramming in a few last lessons before the final bell of the year and more about how students are feeling concerning the year that was and themselves as students. These things matter in those last weeks because, like Angelou says, those feelings will linger over the summer and into the new year and beyond

This is where my favorite writing assignment for May enters. It serves a double role: It draws the students’ attention back to all of our writing lessons from the year while also seeking to evoke feelings of accomplishment, pride, and joy. 

The assignment is called “The Best Page of Writing,” and its prompt is simple: For students to write a single page (double-spaced) on a topic of their choice that is some of the best writing they’ve ever made. The way they make it one of the best pages they’ve ever written is for them to use the tools, tricks, and concepts from the whole year, and before we embark on it, we review them all in a massive review session.

Then, despite the short length of the assignment, I give them multiple drafting days, and they also get feedback from both me and peer response. This combination of its relative shortness with the significant time investment is the true secret to the assignment. The students are only writing 12, 13, or 14 sentences, and so they have time to really mull over each and think about the different structures, different tools, and different word or convention choices available for each sentence.

And the results of this paper have been end-of-the-year magic, with the students often producing papers that they feel both proud and joyful about. Further, it gives us an excuse to revisit everything thoughtfully in a way that doesn’t feel tacked on. 

Then, in their final feedback, I seek to leave a message that is less about skills and more about feelings: I tell them that now that they have written at that level, they now know how to do it again in the fall when they move up to the next grade!  

For those who are interested, here is a copy of the assignment and a link to it…

…And if you have any great end-of-the-year assignments, let me know; I’d love to share what you do with others here.

Until then, thanks for reading, and happy Friday.

Yours in teaching,

Matt

*In preparation for this post, I went searching for the source and struggled to find it. Maya Angelou is my favorite author, so I want to protect her from misquotes, but regardless of its author, the quote captures something important, especially about end-of-the-year teaching.