The Last 5 Min | No Prep | 10 min PD | Free Resource for Administrators
Ask a student on the way home what they learned today and the answer, most of the time, is "nothing."
They are not being difficult. Nobody ever asked them to say it. The last five minutes of class is exactly where they would have practiced saying it — and in most classrooms, that window went to packing up.
This is a ten-minute staff meeting session that gives it back. You print one page, open seven slides, and run it. Every teacher rates one honest question about how their class ends, hears one strategy, and writes down one specific thing to try tomorrow. Nothing is collected. Nothing is graded.
What is in it
Principal quick start — one page. The ten minutes laid out, three cautions, and what to say at the moment that matters most.
Seven editable slides — PowerPoint and Google Slides, with a school-name placeholder on the title.
One-page teacher handout — the question, the strategy, and space to write their own version.
Print one page per teacher. Open the slides. That is the entire preparation.
How the 10 minutes run
0:00–1:30 — Opening, and the plain statement that this is a refresher, not a correction.
1:30–3:00 — The hook: the question every parent asks in the car.
3:00–4:30 — Why the last five minutes are the only part of the hour where students do the remembering instead of watching you do it.
4:30–6:30 — One honest question, rated in silence, then thirty seconds with a partner.
6:30–8:30 — One strategy, and each teacher writes their own version of it.
8:30–10:00 — Close. You end the meeting early, on purpose, which is the same thing you have just spent ten minutes asking teachers to do.
Will my veteran staff think this is a criticism?
Not if you run it as written. Slide two exists for exactly this: it says plainly that most of the room already knows this material, that some of them have been closing a class well for decades, and that this is a refresher rather than a correction.
The framing is honest, not a device. Habits drift, and the close is the first thing any of us drops in a hard week — including the people who are best at it. The quick start gives you the words and tells you not to say them as an apology.
The one strategy
Teachers do not leave with a philosophy. They leave with one thing they can run tomorrow.
The 60-Second Write. Every student answers one question in writing — "What is the most important thing you learned today, and why?" One minute. Not a discussion, not hands up, not the three students who always volunteer. Everybody writes.
It needs no materials and no preparation, and it is the clearest version of the whole idea: in the last five minutes, the students should be doing the work.
Who it is for
Principals, assistant principals, instructional coaches, department chairs, and team leaders. It runs in a staff meeting, department time, a PLC, or the front end of an institute day, and it works at any grade level and in any subject.
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE LAST 5 MINUTE MINI PD
When your staff wants the rest
This is the ten-minute version, and it is genuinely useful on its own. It is also deliberately incomplete.
The 30-minute No-Prep PD session adds:
A twelve-item self-assessment, scored out of 48, with interpretation bands
Four more closing strategies, each tagged to the specific gap it fixes
A planning page that produces an observable routine, plus a start date and a partner witness
A word-for-word facilitator script with objection handling
A follow-up pack: the staff email, a scripted two-week check-in, and walkthrough look-fors
The two sessions open differently on purpose, so a staff who ran this one does not sit through the same hook twice.
Free. No membership, no purchase.
Where to go from here
Knowing what should happen is the easy part. Making it hold up once the calendar fills is the work most leaders are actually doing.
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