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This Week's Topic Wrapping Up the Year Endings are important. They leave students with their final impressions of you, the course and its contents, and their classmates. This week’s Teaching Tips offer advice for a successful wrap-up. This Week's Tips Help Students Make the Transition (Monday) Just as you helped students make a transition into your course, help them make a transition out of it. You’ll want to find the balance between leaving students a little hungry to learn more about the subject and, at the same time, feeling they have learned a great deal. Try this tip to help you strike that balance: During the course, give students plenty of information plus the tools they’ll need if they decide to go into the discipline in greater depth. Use a Learning Inventory (Tuesday) To help students have a good understanding of what they learned during the course, use a learning inventory. Asking students to think about what they learned helps clarify the material for them and allows them to chart how far they’ve come. Create your own learning inventory, or use the one in this week’s Download Depot. Also, toward the end of the course, overview the course during a class discussion. Provide a series of questions about the course that students must answer.
Use Evaluations (Wednesday) Use the end-of-the year evaluations your school provides, or ask students to write an evaluation of the course material and your teaching abilities. Use the information in these evaluations to improve your teaching skills. Remember these tips: Throw out any evaluations that praise you too highly and any that sound like sour grapes. The rest are more valid. Students should never sign their names on evaluations. Anonymous evaluations are more valid. Use the Textbook (Thursday) Use the review materials at the end of each chapter and unit to write your final exam. Before the final exam, review the material in class. These tips might help: Divide the class into teams. Alternate giving the teams questions, asking one member from each team a question. If a member of one team can’t answer the question, give the question to a member of the opposite team. The team members who can’t answer correctly are eliminated. The last team with a member still able to correctly answer questions wins. Use Cooperative Learning (Friday) Use cooperative learning groups to review the course material for final exams. Try any of the following: Use the end of book, chapter, and unit summaries and activities for review. Have students work in small groups to summarize major ideas and lessons. Have groups use key words and phrases to ask one another for definitions. Have groups write several questions and then ask another group to answer them. |
