by Eric Royer, Program Director, Reinert Center
The Reinert Center’s Resources Revisited series highlights existing resources available to the SLU teaching community that may be especially timely or useful at certain points in the academic year.
As we approach the final weeks of the fall semester, students are navigating several demands. Final exams, research papers and projects, and other academic responsibilities often converge with competing deadlines, increased stress, and other personal responsibilities.
For our November 2026 entry, we’re revisiting several Reinert Center resources that can help support student success and persistence during these final weeks. In particular, we’re highlighting resources focused on preparing students for final assessments, supporting student well-being, and maintaining instructional continuity in the event academic disruptions occur.
Preparing students for final assessments
Whether your students are preparing for final exams, research projects, or something else, the final weeks of the semester provide an opportunity to revisit how we communicate our expectations and prepare students to show us that they’ve met the course learning objectives we set for them.
Our resource guide on Articulating the Purpose of Course Assignments offers strategies for making the purpose of an assignment explicit to students. The Basics of Formative Assessment provides strategies for gathering information about student learning and using that information to inform next steps in the learning process. Our resource guide on Grounding Assessment in Course Experiences encourages instructors to connect assessments to students’ experiences, interests, and learning activities in a course, thus supporting alignment. Pedagogical Strategies Supporting Student Emotional Labor Towards Learning also encourages us to recognize the demands placed on students when completing challenging academic work.
Supporting student well-being
The final weeks of the semester place demands on students’ time management, their motivation, and their ability to get things done, which may impact their well-being in our courses. Our resource guides on Supporting Affective Executive Functioning Skills and Supporting Cognitive Executive Functioning Skills offer practical strategies for helping students navigate these demands. Our resource guides on Promoting a Culture of Care and Addressing Student Need offer additional guidance for responding to students who are experiencing difficulties. This Notebook blog titled “A little bit goes a long way in supporting student well-being” is also a timely read for ideas on how you might create a more supportive learning environment through empathy and other instructional interventions.
Maintaining instructional continuity
Finally, a number of circumstances may require you to teach remotely or to assign and grade assessments with short notice: a campus closure, illness, inclement weather, or in the event we don’t have access to Canvas. We have an entire subset of resources devoted specifically to the topic of Instructional Continuity, should you need to make a swift change to your course delivery method or final assessments using the available technology to keep your course running. Our resource guides on Preparing for an Academic Disruption and Analog Alternatives for a Digital Disruption in Distance Learning are particularly helpful (and the latter is not necessarily course modality specific).
Supporting student success and persistence, even in the final weeks of the term, might not require radical or major changes to what you’re already doing. Sometimes revisiting assignment expectations, offering opportunities for feedback, checking in with students, and preparing contingencies for academic disruption can make a meaningful difference.
We invite you to explore the full range of resources offered on the Reinert Center website. And if you’d like more personalized support, we’re happy to meet with you for a one-to-one consultation in-person or via Zoom. Feel free to request a teaching consultation to discuss these strategies, or any other teaching topic.
