Before You Leave for Summer Break

The end of the school year has arrived! We know the last couple weeks can feel busy with final exams, students turning in late work, and end-of-year assemblies (let alone graduation!), but we wanted to offer a few ideas to make sure the year ends on a high. This is an opportunity to help students remember that this year doesn’t just end in a final grade but represents a culmination of learning and growth. Here are three tips we have for those final couple weeks of school.

1. Help your students reflect with the help of good questions.

As John Dewey once said, “We don’t learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.” Take a few minutes to help your students think back on this school year and reflect on how far they’ve come. You could ask students to share in small groups or journal their responses. You could even have a whole class discussion around one of these questions, but we suggest offering students individual think time first. Here are 10 questions to get you started. Pick your favorite 1 or 2 to make sure the task remains meaningful and doesn’t feel overwhelming.

1. What’s something in math that finally started to make sense this year?
2. What’s a mistake you made that actually helped you learn?
3. What’s a question you still have about math?
4. When did you feel most confident in math this year?
5. Which activity, lesson, or problem do you still remember? Why do you think it stuck with you?
6. What’s something you learned about yourself as a learner this year?
7. What advice would you give next year’s students about learning math in this class?
8. What helped you most when you got stuck this year?
9. When did working with other people help you understand something better?
10. What is something that surprised you about math class this year?

2. Do one final rich task. 

Throughout the year you’ve challenged students with interesting questions that required persistent problem solving, clear communication, and being willing to change one’s mind and take up the ideas of others. Sometimes these tasks were directly related to the new content students were learning, and sometimes these tasks represented a break from the standard curriculum but offered an opportunity to focus on the mathematical practices in a new way. The end of the school year is a perfect time to present another one of these rich tasks. Without the constant feeling of “we have to get through this,” students are often more willing to take risks, share ideas, ask questions, and simply enjoy wrestling with a good problem.

We’ve come up with a brand new task that emphasizes reasoning and communication, offers multiple entry points and solution paths, and fosters productive struggle.

Get the Task

Facilitating the Task

When facilitating this task, here are a few questions you can ask students as they’re working in groups:

• Which actions will have the biggest impact? How are you going to maximize that impact?
• What did you try that didn’t work? How did you update your strategy?

After about 15-20 minutes of working in groups, we recommend having students share solutions and insights in a whole class debrief. You can ask the following questions to structure the debrief:

• How did you choose what to do first? Last?
• Do any of the actions undo each other? If so, when? If not, why not?
• [Student presents answer]. Can we improve upon this? How?

Extending the Task

For a challenge, ask students if they can come up with an order that results in a negative value on Day 10. If they achieve that, ask what the lowest possible negative value is and to justify their reasoning.

3. Set yourself up for next year.

No, we don’t mean making all your copies for next year or overhauling your curriculum. But doing a few small things while you’re still in the mindset of school can be helpful.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Identify one new thing you tried in your teaching this year that went well and that you want to do again next year (ex: a new routine for giving quizzes, using a timer for your EFFL lesson, using a norm-building activity–like Lots of Dots– during the first week of school, etc.)
• Identify one lesson that didn’t go as well as you’d hoped and make a note about what you wish was different. Put this with your materials for next year so you make sure to revisit it, or better yet, make the tweak right now so it’s all ready to go.
• Remember one student success story. Write it on a sticky note and put it somewhere you’ll look at when you’re getting ready for next year.

The end of the year is not the time to set big, lofty goals for next year that sound dreamy right now but will leave you feeling overwhelmed when it’s time to implement them. Instead we recommend identifying a few small things that you want to keep or change, which is both manageable and will help you feel like you’re already making headway on next year’s planning.

Enjoy your summer break. You deserve it!