Testing Season: What to Teach the Week After the State Test

Quick answer: The week after the state test is the best teaching week of the year and almost every school wastes it. Students are relieved, the pacing pressure is gone, and nothing new is being assessed. Use it for the unit you never have room for: applied projects, a topic outside the tested standards, or the extended work the test format made impossible.

Why is this week usually thrown away?

Because the calendar treats it as leftover time. Testing ends, the pacing guide has already been covered, and there is a month of school remaining with no obvious purpose. So the week fills with movies, field day, and worksheet packets, and students learn that everything before the test was the only part that counted.

That is a costly lesson to teach. The week after the test is also the week students are most willing to try something unfamiliar, because for the first time since January nothing they do is being scored against a cut point.

What should actually go in that week?

• Applied projects. The thing your subject looks like outside a test booklet. Build it, measure it, present it.
• Untested content you care about. Every teacher has a topic cut from the pacing guide in October. Teach it now, properly, with an assessment at the end.
• Escape rooms and problem sets with a real structure. Group reasoning under a time limit, which the test format never allows.
• Reading a whole thing. A full short story, a full article, a full experiment, rather than an excerpt with six questions after it.

How do you get students to work when the stakes are gone?

Give them a product with an audience. Work that ends in a display, a presentation to another class, or something a younger grade will use gets effort that a worksheet does not, because there is a reason to finish it well.

Keep the group size at three or four and give each group a deadline inside the period rather than at the end of the week. The single biggest predictor of a wasted post-test week is a project with a Friday deadline and no checkpoints, which produces four days of talking and one hour of panic.

Topics that are genuinely current also help. A unit on AI and Responsibility gives middle schoolers something they already have opinions about and a reason to build an argument, which is exactly the skill the test measured and never let them practice.

Which standards does the week still cover?

More than the tested week did, in most cases. Extended projects cover the standards that multiple choice cannot reach: constructing an argument from evidence, designing an investigation, revising work after feedback, and presenting findings to an audience.

In science, the post-test week is where the actual practices live. In ELA, it is where students write more than a constructed response. In math, an escape room built from the year's content covers reasoning and modeling with mathematics.

Write the standards on the board and tell students which ones the test could not measure. They find that interesting, and it reframes the week as the harder work rather than the easier work.

What about students who are still testing?

Makeups and accommodations will pull students out for days. Every plan must therefore tolerate absence: group roles that can be reassigned, no lesson that depends on the previous day, and a written record a returning student can catch up from in ten minutes. A short group task such as The Lost Time Archive handles this better than a five-day project, because a returning student joins an intact group mid-task and loses nothing.

Frequently asked questions

Should I give grades for post-test work?

Yes. The moment students learn the work is ungraded, the week becomes recess.

How do I keep the last month from becoming this week repeated?

Plan the whole remaining stretch at once, before testing starts. Three weeks of projects, then the end-of-year close.

My department wants review for next year's placement test. Is that worth it?

Two periods, not two weeks. Retrieval practice fades quickly over a summer, and the goodwill costs more than the points gain.

What if half my class is on a field trip?

Run stations rather than a whole-class lesson. Stations survive a missing third of the room.

Related posts

• End-of-Year Activities for Grades 6-12 That Aren't a Movie
• Halloween Math and Logic Activities for Grades 6-9
• The First Five Days: A Back-to-School Plan for Grades 6-9