Saying goodbye to this non-traditional school year has not an easy road to navigate. We have written the playbook while finishing the game, built the plane while flying in the air. Throughout this process, teachers have tried to make a collective trauma feel like a new normal for students. By sending videos, emails, and cards, we have tended to our students' social and emotional needs. Through structure, routine, and instructional activities, we have tried to keep their minds engaged. Surviving weeks of instruction have been our goal, but now we have been tasked with saying goodbye. While my school year ended a week ago, many local elementary districts and school districts are currently wrapping up their final weeks on a national level. How do we say goodbye to students we cannot see face-to-face?
Start by creating a heartfelt end of the year assignments. No matter the subject taught, find a way to connect. Flipgrid is a great platform that allows students to see a teacher's face. This webtool allows for us to talk asynchronously and engage in powerful nonverbal communication. Prompts can be as straightforward as giving a graduation speech or a last lecture to a class or as creative as delivering a math-gram message to say goodbye using vocabulary from a year of geometry. Students could showcase how many planks they can do in a physical education class or embody a famous person to deliver a farewell address in a social science class. Be creative, and keep the content, but don't forget to emphasize the importance of communication and human connection. Students might find an assignment like this fun or engage because they're bored and miss your face!
Ask students to write. Literacy is a critical skill in all disciplines. Writing allows them to express their feelings and also share their reasoning and logic. From solving a word problem in math to explaining how World War Two was won, they can use their words to demonstrate knowledge and understanding. We are living history right now, so find a way to encourage students to write to express their thoughts, reactions, and perspectives of the world in which we are currently living. Find ways to make final prompts relevant to their lives right now, and they will not only be able to demonstrate academic prowess, but they will also be able to express their current feelings. These writings can give a teacher direct insight into individual students while allowing them to amplify their voices as primary sources for this pandemic.
Have them create a visual representation of their work. Whether it be creating a portfolio website or making work visible on a platform like Padlet, find a way to showcase student work. My favorite final project was having students make a COVID Time Capsule. This project allowed students to apply essential skills from my class and reflect on themes from other units while still personalizing the experience to their thoughts, feelings, and reactions during the quarantine. Students who had been disengaged previously picked up this assignment and wanted to share their ideas. They wanted to be able to express what they were experiencing from their perspective and needed that outlet. In my drama class, I had students write quarantine related monologues. These monologues gave voice to many different perspectives of people living on the pandemic frontlines working in hospitals, grocery stores, and delivering food. These projects fit my classroom, but the intention behind them could be applied in any discipline from creating a marketing plan for an essential business to designing a new fitness center in engineering that adheres to the CDC guidelines. Students can get creative and use the skills they have gained from any class to capture our collective experiences during the quarantine. Through pictures, drawing, creative presentations, or other multimedia projects, students can showcase diverse skills and share what they've learned in innovative ways.
During this time, it is important to note that subjects such as art, music, and other electives have been incredibly invaluable during the quarantine. These subjects have always been the heart of our schools, and their significance has only been elevated. These elective subjects are why students get up and go to school; these teachers foster safe spaces for all types of students. Now more than ever, these teachers have created opportunities to express themselves. These creative projects and assignments do not have to remain in the elective realms. Find ways to offer students choice and opportunities to use their talents in your classes by encouraging them to create a rap about history, make a video demonstrating Newton's Laws of Physics. Challenge them to use their painting, drawing, vocal, musical, or dance skills and pair it with a final lesson or project in your classroom. The results will not only dazzle but inspire other students to engage, too. By encouraging students to use their talents, they will see the relevance and importance of core content areas alongside their passions and personal interests.
Aside from fun end-of-the-semester projects, we need to gather information by allowing students time to process the end of the year in a more formal sense. No matter what subject or level taught, challenge students to reflect on the class experience and their own experiences. A short, personalized survey with a mixture of likert-style questions and open-ended questions can allow students to share valuable information with us as teachers. Keep the verbiage on the survey clear and positive. Frame an assignment or survey as a tool that can help you to become a better teacher. Encourage students to share what worked well for them and what could have gone better. Remote learning is a new educational format. The best way to improve is to receive authentic and meaningful feedback. After gathering both qualitative and quantitative data about the learning experience, challenge students to reflect on their engagement during this time. What they have discovered about themselves will continue to impact their learning styles and abilities moving forward.
While surveys may look different at the early elementary level to upper high school, we should challenge students to reflect in ways that are meaningful for their developmental stage. Not only should we gather information about our class structure and instructional delivery, but we should take this time to challenge students to reflect on their actions and take ownership of their learning. How did they fair as students? How did they manage their emotions? What challenges did they face at home that impacted their feelings? Having students self-reflect on their actions and feelings during this time can allow us to target students who may need additional support in the summer. Gather social and emotional information and use that information to follow up with students in the summer. We might be off the clock, but as we have learned by teaching remotely, the clock may buzz at the end of a basketball game, but the clock in the teacher-student relationship game doesn’t end.
Ultimately, this is not the final goodbye. If anything, it has made me internalize the notion that my students will always be my students. Bound through uncertain times, we will forever have shared this historic time. In the end, it is okay to have fun. It is okay to shift gears away from tests and exams to reflect, create, and share. Teaching is a work of heart, and that love is what got our students through this time. It's that love that will continue to get through whatever they face beyond our classroom, too.
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