Calvin and Hobbes sum up what the week before Thanksgiving can feel like, both for us and for our students. There is too much to do in too little time, in a world that feels too chaotic. Even simple tasks can feel overwhelming and complicated. If we’re being honest, who out there doesn’t just want to take a nap and hope that things seem better when we wake up?
But this is also the time of the semester when our students—with our framing and encouragement—are putting together the puzzle pieces of their semester’s learning.
Last week, a colleague remarked that in Week 11, she was actually feeling energized by her classes because students now have a solid base of material they had worked through. This meant that she can see them engaging with class discussion and questions in ways that they could not have done in August. She can see them applying their learning and thinking new things, at this exhausting time of year!
That kind of cumulative learning energy is what we plan and design for when we finalize our syllabi in August. By November, though, it can be easy to get lost in the daily challenges of managing assignments, class plans, registration advising, academic integrity violations, and stress (our students’ and our own).
Creating space in our classes to make our students’ learning visible to them can remind us of our original plan and the progress we’ve made, as well as building students’ confidence that their final assignments build on what they’ve been thinking about all semester.
This week, I encourage you to take 10-15 minutes in class to ask your students an open-ended question about what they’ve been learning this semester. Something like: What are some things about our class topic that you didn’t know in August? Collect those ideas on the board. Celebrate all the learning they’ve done so far. Take a moment to appreciate the teaching you’ve accomplished. And then help them to think about how that learning has set them up to succeed in the final challenges of the semester.