Three weeks ago I discussed how conclusions are often an afterthought in writing instruction. The unwritten rule I’ve observed—and often followed—is that the conclusion is a sort of cherry on top of an essay sundae. Like with the cherry, instruction concerning conclusions is a nice touch if you happen to have the time and space, but it isn’t too big a deal to skip it either. 

In writing that post, I began to think about how this common approach to teaching (or more accurately often not really teaching) conclusions has a lot in common with how we often approach the conclusion of the school year. While the beginning of the school year comes with endless planning and parsing of details and the late fall and winter see lots of heavy skill-building, the final quarter tends to be the least conceptualized and most haphazard.  

Dave Stuart Jr., recently noted this in a wonderful series of posts about the end of the school year (check out the first of the series here), and he argues that many teachers tend to approach the last weeks of the year in two less-than-ideal ways: 

• The let’s-just-get-there, limping-through-it approach 
• The jam-in-everything, I’m-so-behind approach 

Stuart Jr.’s observation feels pretty accurate to me (and at times I feel I have been in both modes), and he rightfully wonders whether either of these is the best way to approach our last weeks with our students. Frenetically sprinting through a massive pile of work or blaring our countdown clocks at full volume hardly feel like recipes for meaningful, lasting learning.

At the same time, by this point in the spring, we are often pretty spent and have spent most of our best lessons, the students are noticeably looking for the exits, and the major tests are done (or at least they are here in Michigan). So what to do?

Stuart Jr. calls for a third option where we pick 1-3 areas of practice and try to make a solid improvement before the final bell of the school year rings. I do something similar, albeit slightly different. I think of the most essential lessons of the year and then I find a way for students to do three things with the key lessons in these areas:

1. Retrieve them.
2. Connect them.
3. Play with them.  

The reason I take this specific approach is explained well in Blake Harvard’s new book Do I Have Your Attention? Understanding Memory Constraints and Maximizing Learning.* In it, he makes several important points that help to explain my approach to this time of the year:

1. Humans are designed to forget far more than to remember. We forget things constantly, and even things in our long-term memory are subject to, as Harvard puts it, “a never-ending battle” against forgetting. And the key to winning this battle and holding on to the most important information? Retrieving and using the information again and again and again (p. 62).
2. Human memory is like a spiderweb. Harvard points out that we tend to think of memory as being like computer memory, with each piece of information nestled in its own file. In reality though our brains are a series of connections, and we remember things things better and faster when they exist in a robust web of connections. Thus, the more connections we can make concerning something, the easier it is to understand and remember that something for a long time (p. 10-11)

Put these two together and add the power of play and joy, which I’ve found to be critical to maintaining engagement after eight months of my students having to listen to me, and you get why I spend my spring months revisiting and reconnecting previously-covered material in joyful ways.** 

To see this in action, let’s take my assignment from last week: The Grammar and Language Book. The idea for this came from an interview I did while writing Good Grammar, where the interviewee, who was nearly 60, showed me a grammar and language manual he made for his 8th grade ELA class and claims to still use all the time. The tattered, forty-year-old grammar manual tickled my imagination, and pedagogically, I loved how it was the opposite of the common single-use mini-lesson approach to grammar. 

With that in mind, I created my own Grammar and Language book assignment that aims to get students retrieving key information, connecting that information, and playing with it. Here is a link to the assignment, and here are the key features:

1. I required the book to be handwritten (we remember far more of what we write by hand) and offered regular encouragement for students to have fun with it. To make it silly and in their own style. And my students totally ran with it this year. I got everything from the Comma Chameleon to the Grammar and Language Quest Video Game (see below).

2. In the assignment, I organized the grammar/language lessons from the year into categories (the same ones from Good Grammar) to help the students to see the connections. Further, for each section the students were asked to write an introduction explaining the category and why it matters.
3. Lastly, I came to class with printed copies of all the slides and assignments from the year that students were allowed to reference, but I encouraged them to try to remember them first (and discuss them with classmates second). The goal was to get them engaging in retrieval practice. Computers were also not available to them, as I’ve learned that on assignments like this the urge to hit the easy button and ask ChatGPT—as opposed to engaging in the productive struggle to figure it out—is too great for many of them. At first, you could tell this annoyed some, but that annoyance turned into the joy of physical creation for most once they got rolling.

And the results were such a lift to my classroom after the post-testing malaise. It was also clear that many students understood the grammar and language lessons so much better after spending a couple days remembering, connecting, and playing with them. 

A point that lies at the center of both Stuart Jr. and Harvard’s work is how rehearsing already-learned information is essential for memory and deep learning. I couldn’t agree more, so I view this time of year and my end-of-year assignments as a sort of dress rehearsal. We’ve been practicing bits and pieces all year, and now we get to put them on and watch in wonder as they all work together. 

Thanks for reading, and yours in teaching,

Matt

*I’ve been reading Harvard’s newsletter The Effortful Educator for years, and his book is all that I hoped it to be and more. I definitely encourage you to both check out his newsletter and the book. 

**While much of my final quarter is about looking back, it isn’t all review. Instead, most of the quarter involves using new texts to revisit old lessons.

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