Sometimes, it can be a simple shift, like creating the project with a specific group in mind. Connect with an organization - or an underserved population in your community. Your students have developed knowledge and skills that can benefit others. As you and your students think about these projects, think about how they can be done to benefit others. Purpose - doing something bigger than yourself - is one. Think about a higher purpose. In his book Drive, Dan Pink says there are three main drivers of motivation, according to science.Plus, not every student has to see every other student’s project. A digital gallery walk can be done in short order. Creating for an audience doesn’t mean sitting through an oral presentation by every student for three days.

Think about the audience. Who will get to see these projects? If the audience is larger than one person (the teacher), there’s a chance students’ motivation will be higher.Help them find the right subset of what they’ve learned - or summarize and choose from their pool of learning wisely. Students can’t include everything from the semester in these projects. Prioritization is key. These projects, believe it or not, are exercises in curation and brevity.But messy for you may be liberating for them. Giving students some choices in their projects - and letting their personalities shine through wherever possible - can be messy. Give choice and personalization options. I’ve heard someone say that student projects where they all turn out exactly the same aren’t projects.If these are independent projects, let them do their own independent review. Avoid lots of whole-class review. Re-teaching lots and lots of content from the semester will make many students turn their attention switches to “off”.We want to see what stuck in their memories. Provide some thinking time. Let students probe their brains - and notes and other resources - for what stands out to them, what they remember.Some ideas for making end-of-semester projects as effective as possible: These cumulative activities pull from lessons learned throughout the whole semester - or year. We aren’t checking for fact recall from the latest activity. These projects are, in many ways, summative assessments. End-of-semester final projects are cumulative Projects let students take what they’ve learned, put it all together and show off a little of their own creativity and personality.Īnd maybe, just maybe, that project may spark a passion that may stick with them for the rest of their lives. How can your students encapsulate the most important parts of the semester to demonstrate learning?Īt the end of the semester, it’s easy to slip into “review for the test” mode. After months and months of learning, it all comes down to this.

Drive dan pink