'What Do You Need Wednesday?' from The Beacon
"...every tiny thing by one percent..."
As we approach the end of the school year (with that horizon more immediate for some rather than others) we nonetheless wanted to focus this week’s WDYN on how to end the year with brilliance instead of blandness.
💥 Going out With a Bang
Although written with a higher ed audience as its primary focus, this Chronicle of Higher Education piece—7 Ideas to Perk Up Your Last Day of Class—can serve as an inspiration for creating a memorable ending, regardless of division or discipline. “What if,” asks author Kristi Rudenga, “we brought some focused intention to the final day of class and turned it into a synthesis and celebration of everything students have learned?
Below, Buckley Executive Director Justin Cerenzia shares three past versions of his “Final Slide” closer, capturing big, applicable ideas from past courses. So too were students tasked with crafting their own “Final Slide” as a means to help them distill their learning over the year.
Have a great closer you’d like to share? Do so here and we’ll compile responses and share back next week.
🔎 Retrieving Instead of Reviewing
It’s not just semantics—there’s strong research to suggest the power of retrieval practice throughout the year, but particularly at the end. This piece from Dr. Pooja Agarwal’s Retrieval Practice site, highlighting the “brain dump” activity, is a particularly effective strategy for year-end reviews in the classroom. The technique involves asking students to write down everything they remember about a topic, without the pressure of being graded. It's a rapid, low-preparation method that can be implemented in just a few minutes at the start or end of a class. This makes the "brain dump" an invaluable tool for maximizing the efficiency of review sessions, ensuring that both teaching and learning are focused and effective.
Did you know that we’ll welcome Dr. Agarwal for next October’s professional development day? Well, now you do.
🧠 Eyes on AI
Framing generative AI as an “arrival” technology versus an “adoption” one, MIT professor Justin Reich has been one the leading voices on its impact in education across K-16 settings. In this episode of his outstanding TeachLab Podcast Reich takes an even deeper dive, exploring the ways AI allows students to easily “bypass cognition,” which runs counter to the hopes and aspirations of many year-end assessments. Reich’s tone is one of pragmatism about the challenges and opportunities presented by generative AI, but the call to ensure that we design learning experiences in such a way that impedes student ability to easily bypass cognition is a useful reminder that we still have agency amidst the profound disruptions we’ve experience over the last year.
Want to learn more? You can find the slides from Professor Reich’s accompanying talk, here.
🐟 The Last Word
The Last Word is meant to be a final offering to prime your thinking for the work ahead. Intentionally adjacent to the research-heavy offerings we frequently reference, the Last Word is purposefully eclectic, oftentimes playful, and deliberately thought provoking.
What better way to close a WDYN on endings than with a commencement speech? Below is a video adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech to graduates at Kenyon College, colloquially known as ‘This is Water.’ It’s a useful reminder of what all of this education might actually be for in the end. The full text of Wallace’s speech can be found here.