The last day of class carries outsized importance in your students’ recollection and perception of your course, serving as a sort of outro for its motifs and themes. But too often, given the inevitable whirlwind of April chaos as graduation looms, we end our courses with a frantic scramble, a jarring halt, or an uninspiring sputter. None of those, unfortunately, are psychologically satisfying or pedagogically effective.
What if, instead, we brought some focused intention to the final day of class and turned it into a synthesis and celebration of everything students have learned?
As with so many teaching challenges, the first step is to establish clear goals for what you want your students to accomplish on that last day. Are you aiming to help students recognize how far they’ve come? Build connections between topics and skills? Prepare for the final exam?
Once you’ve settled on those goals, commit both the planning time and class time to achieving them. You’ll need to craft an activity specifically to meet your last-day goals. Here are seven ideas to get your wheels turning:
The job-interview prompt. I’ve used this activity to great effect as a way to get students talking about key course takeaways. The idea, suggested on the Teaching Professor Blog, is for students to work in pairs and answer this prompt: “You’ve got an interview for your dream job. The interviewer, who may become your boss, is looking at your transcript and says, ‘Oh, I see you took [insert the course name]. Tell me what you learned in that course.’” Then have the pairs share the results in a classwide discussion.
When students prioritize the main things they’ve learned and articulate those concepts or skills with minimal jargon, they’re more likely to remember them than if you had provided a summary.
The content web. In my neuroscience course on “food and the brain,” I use an activity — inspired by James M. Lang’s “minute thesis” exercise — that I call a “content web.” I write the names of 15 primary topics in a circle and ask students to draw lines between two of the topics and then explain their connection. Students first work in pairs to do this activity on paper, and then take turns sharing their connections with the whole class on the board. One pair of students, for example, noted how food expectations and labeling, which we’d discussed in Week 13 of class, directly influences people’s perception of flavor, which we’d focused on in Week 5.
Using colored sticky notes or markers, my students and I add a layer of major themes, differences, and conclusions, creating a richly interconnected, brightly speckled web on the board. The result is a wave of “Aha!” moments among students as the many varied pieces of the course click together into a more cohesive whole.
The learning-goals prompt. You probably started the semester with a list of course learning goals on your syllabus. Why not end it by finding ways to revisit, and thus reinforce, those central goals. In a small course, you might lead a discussion asking students to describe their biggest challenges and successes in meeting the goals. In a large class, you could show slides of the goals and ask students to rate their progress toward each goal in a live poll.
You can even use the discussion as a springboard to help students prioritize what to study for the final exam. This exercise doesn’t have to take much class time, but it can pay great dividends for your students.
The revisit-and-resubmit prompt. Ask students to revisit an essay they wrote early in the semester and analyze how the course content has (or hasn’t) changed their views. They could do this during a final class or as a pre-class assignment to lay the groundwork for a last-day discussion.
My colleague, Misbah Hyder, now a visiting assistant professor at the teaching center of the U.S. Naval War College, uses this activity in her religion and politics courses. At the end of the semester, she has students revisit a piece of reflective writing they wrote on the first day of class, and mark it up — for example, highlighting in blue the beliefs or stances that they’ve maintained over the course of the semester and, in red, the ones they have changed their minds or are unsure about. She then asks her students to elaborate, pointing to specific realizations or questions that emerged at various points in the course.
The course map. Similar to the content map, this is an easy way to have students organize course content — an activity that, according to How Learning Works: 8 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, can help them consolidate and retain what they’ve learned.
On your last day of class, ask students to create a map of what they have learned this semester, highlighting and naming the interconnections. You may need to encourage them to keep drawing after they think they’re done, to dig deeper into their memories and notes. As a next step on their maps, ask students to highlight or star concepts or connections that they found most surprising or enjoyable, or that they want to prioritize studying before the exam.
The art project. You want students to reflect on their learning journey this semester, but you also want to liven up the last day of class more than a writing activity might accomplish. So ask them to draw it. Give everyone a sheet of paper or poster paper, and prompt them to draw their journey through the course in whatever way makes sense to them. Then have students talk about their drawings in small groups or classwide.
We used this activity with a group of faculty members at a multi-day workshop last year on inclusive teaching, and they produced elaborate graphs, cartoons, and concept maps. Not every academic initially loved being asked to draw, but it led to great conversations about how different people had experienced the workshop.
The goodbye. Don’t be afraid to treat the last day of class as a celebration, a ritual, and a meaningful farewell. In smaller-sized classes, you might go around the room and ask students to share, in a sentence, one thing they’ve learned from a classmate this semester. In larger groups, this can be shortened to a single word or phrase acknowledging a classmate. This brief activity, in my experience, always has a big payoff — it helps students feel recognized for their contributions, and it marks the end of this particular journey.
Be sure to thank students for their engagement and effort, and acknowledge what you learned from them.
Endings matter. If you had invested time and energy into composing and conducting a symphony, how would you end it? Just as no self-respecting musician would scramble to cram in extra notes, quit midmeasure, or forget to finish the piece, faculty members should not allow such fates to befall their courses as the semester winds to a close. Instead, aim to create a meaningful, satisfying crescendo for your course — a clear destination for all the notes and instruments that you and your students have brought together over the term.
For the sake of student learning and your own job satisfaction, end with a flourish instead of a fizzle.
