When Reflection Becomes Choreography: A Final Exam Project

Once final exams roll around, I’m usually running on empty, and honestly, I think the students are too. It’s the final push of the year, but I still want it to feel meaningful and connected to what we’ve been doing all year. So I always start thinking: what makes a good final exam in dance? How can it assess student learning while still feeling creative?

One thing that always gets me excited is choreographing a dance, so “Dance in a Day” has become one of my favorite ways to approach finals. It gives students a chance to create in real time, collaborate, reflect, and use the choreographic and movement concepts we’ve practiced throughout the year.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve kept coming back to one project that has felt especially meaningful: the end-of-year reflection collage. Of course, we use the collages to create a dance on the day of the final exam. By now, most students already know that if I assign something creative, there’s a good chance it will eventually become a dance.
Part of why I return to this project is that students reflect as they actively create. The assignment gives them structure, but also allows them to make it their own.

Students create collages about their year in dance, filling the page with memories, challenges, performances, vocabulary words, quotes, rehearsal moments, lyrics, colors, and images that reflect their experience in class. What I love most is that students are building a visual archive of their year.

Here is how I structure the lesson:

Part 1: Create a Collage
Students include:

• a favorite memory from class, rehearsal, or performance
• a challenge they faced or worked through
• seven dance vocabulary words that represent their year
• a favorite quote, lyric, or classroom saying
• images, colors, textures, or symbols connected to their experience
• a short written reflection

Students also reflect on questions like:

• What moments stand out?
• What did you learn about yourself?
• What helped shape your experience this year?
• What will you remember years from now?​

Part 2: Share the Collage
​In groups of four, each student has one minute to share and explain their collage.

After each presentation, the group responds by sharing what they noticed, heard, remembered, or connected to in the collage.

Part 3: Make a Dance
The collages become the inspiration for choreography. Students pull words, themes, images, and emotions from their collages and translate them into movement. I usually start by making a list of what we already have in the room. I contribute choreography, the students contribute choreography, and everything becomes part of a class dance. This year, I chose “Dancing Queen” by ABBA because I wanted the final to feel fun and celebratory.
Then we begin building choreography task by task. I like guiding students one section at a time so they can layer material as they go. Sometimes I ask them to keep the choreography in a specific order, and sometimes I let the groups decide. It depends on how structured I want the final dance to feel.

Some choreographic tasks include:

• Create 16 counts using dance vocabulary words from the collages. Use at least one word from each person’s collage.*
• Create 16 counts inspired by past warm-ups or class dances from the year.
• Choose one image from the collage that the entire group can physically recreate for 8 counts.
• Explore how that shape moves. Does it travel, rise, fall, shake, turn, melt, or expand?

At the end of the year, when everything can feel rushed and burnt out, this project helps slow things down for a moment and gives students a chance to look back before the year moves into summer.

*For my Beginning Dance classes, I adjusted the assignment to meet the group's needs. Students created a 32-count phrase, and I omitted the section inspired by past warm-ups and class dances. If we had more time, I would have included it. As always, adapt the structure to fit your students' goals and timeline.

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