(If you haven’t read part one, on establishing purpose, or part two, on facilitating well, I’d recommend starting there.)

Parker does a particularly fine job of demystifying the part of a gathering that most seems like a combination of art, magic, and luck: the ending.

The Sense of an Ending

Before offering suggestions on how to end a gathering, Parker reminds us that: 

[G]reat hosts, like great actors, understand that how you end things, like how you begin them, shapes people’s experience, sense of meaning, and memory.

Endings matter because the final moments of a group’s togetherness can substantially influence the entire experience. The ending can modify the experience, make it better or worse, embed it deeply in memory or, absent a strong close, can dilute an experience into something that happened, but mattered little.

Reflecting on the way one organization ends classes, Parker waxes poetic:

The task they have set themselves in closing their training programs is the task of every gatherer who must close any kind of event: to help people fight their urge to turn away from the finitude. It is your job as a gatherer to create an intentional closing that helps people face, rather than avoid, the end.

The candles, the callback, the bagpipes–they serve to unify all of us for a brief moment before we turn to face the end, and the beginning of something else.

Soft You; A Word or Two Before You Go

Too many classes don’t end; time simply expires amidst a mad rush to re-stow materials and salt away personal belongings. Over the din, the teacher shouts a reminder of the homework assignment, as well, perhaps, as an announcement about drama club after school. Students do not reflect on their time together, but look forward individually–to friends, to lunch, to a brief bit of freedom in the hallway. 

Teachers often choose to skip the ending, rationalizing that the students “were all working so well. I just couldn’t interrupt them.”

An underlying reason to bail on the ending is probably also that teachers know the ending is a high stakes activity, and it’s therefore the scariest. Imagine the bagpiper hitting a wrong note, or the comic stumbling over the last joke. Such blunders can poison the whole experience.

But however regrettable it is to interrupt productivity, and however tall the task, embracing the ending means seizing an unmatched opportunity to build community and solidify learnings.

Writing about gatherings’ endings, but ever applicable to teaching, Parker argues:

A gathering is a moment of time that has the potential to alter many other moments of time. And for it to have the best chance of doing so, engaging in some meaning-making at the end is crucial. What transpired here? And why does that matter?

Indeed, excellent teachers are masters at crafting endings to help students feel like the time together mattered, and not that it simply passed.

Parker goes on to put a finer point on a gathering’s end, noting that a strong closing is about:

taking a moment to understand, remember, acknowledge, and reflect on what just transpired—and to bond as a group one last time.

Excellent teachers who guide groups through strong closings tend to steer clear of making meaning themselves. Rather, the work they do during the ending is facilitative. They review the agenda, connect the agenda to the purpose (see part one), highlight key moments, and then find ways to help the students make meaning, first individually, and then together. 

To help students process individually, great teachers pause the class in time for a closing and give students a silent moment to look back on the day, or week, or project, perhaps using:

• A thinking routing like “I used to think…now I know…”
• An exit card
• A looking-back and looking-forward activity like rose, thorn, bud 

After individual reflection comes the really challenging part, and, I confess, seeing an excellent teacher do this is like hearing a symphony or watching a magic trick. 

With a firm understanding of the day’s purpose, and facilitating with generous authority, such teachers elicit authentic and personal responses from multiple voices that construct meaning 

Underlying the seeming magic of masterful teachers are some common elements: 

• Norms for engagement: somehow, all students know their voices are valued. Whether norms are posted on the wall or not, all students in excellent teacher’s classrooms know they are encouraged to share as much as they are comfortable sharing, and perhaps even a little bit more.
• Debrief questions: the questions asked during a debrief tend to be open-ended and therefore generative. They don’t foreclose on sharing negative thoughts, but do foreground the positive and frame the negative as lingering questions. The questions to ask include:
  • What’s a takeaway for you from today?
  • Who did you connect with today?
  • Who can you celebrate?
  • What wonderings remain for you?

Facilitating a closing that attends to the individual and to the group can effectively bring about at least three key outcomes:

• Students are less likely to feel that they merely survived, and more likely to feel as if the time together actually resulted in changes
• Students are less likely to say “nothing,” in response to the question, “What did you learn in class today?”
• The entire group will feel more connected

With those outcomes, students will indeed be more equipped to face “the finitude” and the gathering will have altered “many other moments of time.”

Our Little Life is Rounded With a Sleep

A few years ago, I stood near the bananas in a grocery store, kind of in a daze trying to remember what I needed to buy. A worker stacking fruit asked me how I was doing.

“I’m fine,” I said, “but I have no idea why I’m here.”

Quicker than thought, he replied: “Kind of like bein’ born.”

I nodded. There we stood, for one fleeting moment, together in our desperate loneliness.

What are gatherings but fires against the darkness?

Ultimately, Parker’s book and her aspirations for how we come together can lift an educator’s sights a bit higher and remind us of simple questions, far removed from the school board hearing and the common core and the worksheet.

You and your students will gather together for one hundred hours: what’s possible with that time and space? And how can we fill it with purpose, generosity, meaning, connection, and wonder?