Finish Well

On ending the year with intention, not exhaustion

End of Year. © 2025 forwardED LLC

There’s something holy about a classroom in June. It’s quieter now, the once-crisp bulletin boards peeling at the edges, the whiteboard still smudged with the ghost of old lessons. Students, too, are changing—pulling away, already halfway into summer. And teachers? Teachers are somewhere between collapse and completion, trying to remember what it all meant.

As doors close for the summer, I want to talk about how to end a school year. We talk about how to start strong, how to manage classrooms, how to plan standards-aligned units. But what about the end? What do we do with all that we’ve lived and learned once the last bell rings? This meditation on that final stretch is a call not just to finish, but to finish well.

1. The Other Kind of Learning Loss

There’s another kind of learning loss that rarely gets named: the erosion of teacher wisdom accumulated over the course of ten months.

I spoke to a veteran educator in Baltimore who described to me her year-end ritual: After the last student left, she would pour herself a cup of coffee, open a new notebook, and simply write—stories from the year, student breakthroughs, personal struggles, and the questions that lingered. “I call it a harvest,” she said. “You plant so much during the year. You need to gather what grew.”

Even a few reflective pages—lessons learned, missteps made, glimmers of joy—can become a living archive, a compass for the future. More than that, it’s a declaration: what I lived this year matters.

To finish well means to preserve the treasures you’ve gained. A year-end reflective journal is one way to preserve what you’ve learned, the questions that remain, the moments that cracked you open. What strategies unlocked student growth? What tensions persisted? What did you learn about your students and yourself that challenged your assumptions?

Keeping a record does more than store memory. It protects the soul of your practice. As Parker Palmer (1998) reminds us, “Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.” When we capture what we’ve lived and learned, we seed our future growth and avoid the amnesia that leads to stagnation.

2. Attend to Your Wounds

The second call is not just to end the year but to tend it. It’s tempting to flee the final bell, to shut the classroom door and not look back. The school year doesn’t just demand from us; it depletes us. There are wounds—small and large, visible and buried. A parent’s harsh email. A student you couldn’t reach. The daily compromises of time, attention, and care.

Unattended wounds don’t heal in the summer. They fester, compound, and become the hidden reason so many of us burn out or leave. A study by Schonert-Reichl & Kitil (2017) found that teachers experiencing unprocessed stress and emotional exhaustion are more likely to exhibit diminished instructional effectiveness and less empathetic responses to students. The implications aren’t just personal—they're pedagogical. As trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem (2017) reminds us, “If we don’t metabolize our pain, we pass it on.”

Healing must begin before the break begins. Try this: write a letter—not to send—but to release. Write to your hardest student. Write to yourself. Write to the version of you that started the year full of hope. Say what you need to say. Then go somewhere safe—a body of water, a quiet place—and read it out loud. And let it go.

Seek community, too. Healing rarely happens alone. Gather with colleagues not just to vent, but to witness each other. Host an informal “release circle” and speak the truth of what this year has been. There is profound mental health value in communal reflection (Jennings, 2015), and doing so can reclaim your summer not just as time away, but as time restored. Yet, healing is rarely structured into the rhythm of school. What if we changed that?

I talked to one principal in Oakland who holds a “Release Day” each June. Instead of PD or packing boxes, the staff gathers in a circle. They speak—of pain and pride, failures and healing. Some cry. Some laugh. Some say nothing. “We name what we carried,” the principal told me. And then we set it down.”

How could the final act of the school year be less about escape and more about release?

This isn’t about solving every hurt. It’s about witnessing it. It’s about ending the year not with armor, but with honesty—because only what’s acknowledged can begin to be healed.

3. Don’t Just Rest—Rise

We often tell teachers to “rest” in the summer. But rest alone does not restore. Recovery is physical; renewal is existential. And educators need both.

What if summer wasn’t just a break, but a kind of pilgrimage inward?

One middle school teacher I talked to sets a “summer intention” each June—not a to-do list, but a soul list. One year it was: “reclaim my curiosity.” Another year: “learn to listen better.” From there, she builds a learning path—not of mandates, but of meaning—a memoir to read slowly, a weekend retreat on mindfulness, a conversation with elders about how they taught before integration. These are not for CPD credits. They are for communion.

Audre Lorde (1988) reminds us, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation—and that is an act of political warfare.” SO, finishing well means self-preservation and growth

—not just as a teacher but as a human.

• Want to explore joy? Read Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown.

• Want to reimagine classroom care? Take a short, asynchronous course in trauma-informed teaching (see NCTSN or the Equity Literacy Institute).

• Want to strengthen your connection to youth culture? Watch one documentary per week on topics students care about—environmental justice, policing, gender identity—and take notes not as a critic, but as a learner.

The assignment is not professional development but personal development. Think of it as tending the soil your future students will grow in because “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (hooks, 1994). But that space can only be radical when the person holding it has done the radical work of becoming more human.

4. Love Them Out Like You Loved Them In

Finally—and most importantly—end the year as you began it: with love. Too many of us enter the school year full of hope and empathy and leave it guarded and tired. That erosion is real. The long haul of education wears on our compassion. Yet students—especially those most harmed by systems—deserve us at our most generous, especially at the end of a school year.

We don’t always get to control what students carry with them into the next grade, or next school, or next season of life. But we can control what they carry from us. Make sure it’s love.

I know a teacher in New York City who takes time in the final weeks to reconnect—not just to grade, but to gaze. She writes handwritten notes to her students. She tells them what she saw in them that no one else did. She creates an “affirmation circle” where students share positive words with each other. She throws a “joy day” with music, food, and shared memories. And she does the things to help her students feel seen, celebrated, and whole.

When students leave feeling loved, they return—the next fall or the next decade—still believing in the promise of education and the promise of you. They remember how you sent them off.

A fourth-grade teacher in Detroit once told her students, “I want to be the last adult this year who really saw you.” During their final week, she gave each one a letter naming their gifts. “You speak up for others, even when it’s hard.” “You made us all laugh when we needed it most.” One student kept his letter folded in his back pocket for months.

This kind of love isn’t easy—not in the fatigue of June. But it is necessary, especially for the child who feels invisible, the one who’s moving or mourning, the one who may not hear affirming words again until September.

To finish well is to make sure the last message our students carry isn’t just a grade—but the message that they mattered here.

Finish to Begin

To finish well is to begin again well. It is to gather the wisdom, grieve the wounds, nurture the spirit, and send forth love. It is to treat the closing as a sacred transition between what was and what could be.

So, ask yourself:

• What will I carry forward from this year?

• What do I need to leave behind?

• What kind of teacher—and person—do I want to become next?

In these questions live our next beginning, and that is the most powerful way to end.

References

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Jennings, P. A. (2015). Mindfulness for teachers: Simple skills for peace and productivity in the classroom. W. W. Norton & Company.

Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.

Palmer, P. J. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. Jossey-Bass.

Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Firebrand Books.

Palmer, P. J. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. Jossey-Bass.

Schonert-Reichl, K. A., & Kitil, M. J. (2017). Enhancing teacher well-being and social-emotional competence: A review of the research. Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL).

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Suggested citation: Kirkland, D.E. (2025). Finish Well. In forwardED Perspectives, https://www.forward-ed.com/post/finish-well.

David E. Kirkland, PhD, is the founder and CEO of forwardED. He is a nationally renowned scholar and leading expert on education equity. He can be reached at david@forward-ed.com.