Finishing the Year the Right Way

As the end of the school year approaches, many teachers feel tremendous pressure to finish up content coverage for the year. With precious little time left, they want to race through the remaining curriculum so that they have at least covered everything that their students might encounter on the test.

This is a bad idea. Of course, it is a good idea to cover everything, but through good pacing — not by rushing the last unit(s) of instruction.

The problem with “coverage” is two-fold: first, while rushing through content, any thought that students are actually learning is folly. Teachers know that pedagogy is important and that actual learning takes time and care in the planning. But the pressure to speak the content at students is particularly strong in the last weeks of school. Second, by spending your last few instructional days in an unproductive exercise, you give up the opportunity to solidify some of the learning and understanding that has taken place during the year.

Instead of covering content, consider the most important big ideas that you hope students will carry from your class — the things that you want them to remember 5 or 10 years from now. Anchor your learning activities around these concepts, helping students to solidify their understanding of these concepts and how they relate to the content you have already covered throughout the year.

You will give up on some elements of content, but the student learning on that content would be negligible. Instead, you will make actual gains in student learning by focusing on the concepts and understandings that underlie your teaching.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

― Albert Einstein