Your Teacher WICOR Summer Homework

As school draws to a close, here are my suggestions (using AVID’s WICOR acronym) for some relaxing summer professional development for those times when you want to think a little about work but don’t want to hunker down in full-throttle school-preparatory efforts. 

Writing:  Keep a journal of your summer travels or recording your daily thoughts in your off time.  In addition to allegedly being therapeutic, journaling allows you to flex your writing muscles, something we ask our students to do but perhaps don’t practice often enough ourselves.  If you get stuck about what to write, push through your writer’s block and just write something.  Then you’ll have empathy for what many of your students experience.   

Inquiry:  Make a list of interesting get-to-know-you questions that go beyond the usual where-were-you-born/do-you-have-any-hobbies variety.  Use Costa’s levels of thinking to craft some intriguing higher-level questions.  Cut the questions up into slips or write them on cards and put them in a jar that students can draw from throughout the fall semester for ice-breaking impromptu speeches.  It’ll be a fun way to get to know your students when school starts back up. Test them out on your friends or family one afternoon while you’re lounging around the pool or take your questions with you on a road trip. 

Collaboration:  Find a professional community online of other teachers who teach the same subjects or have similar interests and concerns as you.  Join a Facebook group, follow some Twitter feeds, or read some blogs.  Having others with whom to share ideas, solve problems, or brainstorm will enhance your effectiveness as a teacher and may even help you through some rough spots.  

Organization:  Evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of your classroom routines. How do you manage materials?  Collect assignments?  Deal with discipline, requests for restroom breaks, absences, make-ups, and late work?  Do you communicate with students and parents in effective ways?  Sometimes our best ideas come when we identify an area for improvement and then give ourselves time to ruminate on a solution.  Identifying the problem areas early in the summer and jotting them down somewhere will start your brain thinking about how you’ll do it better in the fall.   

Reading:  Take home one professional development book from school and actually read it.  And then read a bunch of stuff for fun.  Write down the names of things you enjoyed and share them with your students or colleagues next year.  I recommend When Kids Can’t Read by Kylene Beers; Classroom Instruction that Works by Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock; What Great Teachers Do Differently by Todd Whitaker; The Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahey; and Overcoming the Achievement Gap Trap by Anthony Muhammad. For non-professional reading, I suggest Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, The Storied Life of A.J. Fickry by Gabrielle Zevin, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, Better Nate Than Ever byTim Federle, the I Hunt Killers series by Barry Lyga, Far Far Away by Tom McNeal, and We Are Called to Rise by Laura McBride .

Of course, this homework is completely optional and will not be graded in the fall.  It might, though, help you be more prepared for what you’ll be facing when you return to school in August. I hope you have a restful and relaxing summer and come back refreshed and ready for a great school year.