If we want our learners to succeed, it is important to model successful behaviours that have been shown to be beneficial to learning.

It is widely known that students who take the time to review their notes do much better than those who do not. It is important to note that, for many students, time in the classroom is the only space they have to fully dedicate to understanding concepts. With that in mind, use the last 10 minutes of your lecture/workshop time to allow learners to process what has just been covered. Doing so has two main benefits:

• it encourages you to think about the main learning you hope to cover during your session, and
• it allows students to immediately retrieve, use, discuss, and question what they have just learned. Invariably, they can also discard confidently held misinformation in doing this.

You could follow this pattern to organise the 10-minute processing time, allowing about two minutes for each step:

1. Ask your students what they think would be a good exam question based on today’s session.
2. Ask your students to flip their page over and draw a picture that represents a key idea related to this ‘good exam question’.
3. Suggest students turn to a neighbour and share key points from their notes and/or share their Cornell notes.
4. Ask them to compare their proposed exam questions and drawings. Can they answer each other’s questions? Do the drawings make sense to each other?
5. Finally, and possibly most importantly, ask the students what questions remain.

You will find that structuring the end of your session in this way is more effective than simply asking the students, “Do you have any questions?”. Students often interpret that question as a signal that it is time to pack up their laptops and belongings. In contrast, the summarising time and activities makes the students’ thinking visible, and provides an immediate opportunity for students to confront any misconceptions.

Do you have any successful tips/techniques/best practices to share with regard to how you typically end your workshops/tutorials/lectures? If you do not teach, perhaps successful ways to end a presentation?

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