Review & Closure

The last minutes of a lesson can be valuable time spent with your students. An effective lesson closure prompts students to make connections to the material presented and internalize the lesson for long-term memory storage. This 5-10 minute review and "wrap-up" at the end of a lesson helps students synthesize and summarize new information.

There are three elements of an effective lesson closure. A lesson closure should summarize what was learned, check for student understanding, and transition to future instruction. These elements do not necessarily have to proceed in a specific order, and the teacher does not need a separate activity for each element (Hunter, 2004; Price & Nelson, 2003; Willen et al., 2004).

Review & Closure

22 Powerful Closure ActivitiesClosure ends a lesson and creates a lasting impression, so make it fun. Students will better retain information reinforced with music, movement, art, or play.

• Closure is used to cue students to the fact that they have arrived at an important point in the lesson or the end of a lesson.

• Closure is the act of reviewing and clarifying key points of a lesson, tying them together into a coherent whole and securing them to the student’s conceptual network.

• Students may be prompted to bring things together in their own minds, to make sense out of what has just been taught. “Any questions? No. OK, let’s move on” is not closure.

• Closure can help students organize and take stock of their own progress and learning. Exit slips, sharing a summary with a peer or writing one are examples of closure strategies.

• Closure takes place at appropriate transition points in the lesson, not necessarily the end of a particular time period.

The Importance of Debriefing in Learning and What That Might Look Like in the Classroom - Corwin ConnectDebriefing means to examine & analyze upon completion, providing a summary of learning. Here are some examples of debriefing in the math classroom.