Aka: Teachers Are Not Taking the Summer “Off”

This post is week 1 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators. This first prompt is “What are your professional learning goals for this summer?” It’s perfect, because I have a lot of them. I really need to prioritize and focus, and remember that I don’t have to learn everything there is to know in the next two months.

1. I really want to focus on issues of equity in my classroom, and in my community. As part of that, I am participating in a book study of Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools by Amanda E. Lewis through the Eastern Michigan Writing Project.
2. I’ve been slowly working my way towards standards based learning and grading for the past six years or so. This year, I read Fair Isn’t Always Equal by Rick Wormeli and Hacking Assessment by Starr Sackstein. As a result of these two books, I have really adopted a teaching philosophy centered around standards based learning and student self-evaluation and reflection. However, I’m still thinking about grades and their place in our schools, and since I’m also concerned about equity, Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman is also on my to-read list for this summer.
3. Retooling My Curriculum-A 3 Part Goal
   1. This year, my school adopted a new curriculum for 9th and 10th grade ELA with StudySync by McGraw Hill as its foundation. I spent a lot of time this year learning to use the resource and exploring everything it had to offer, and trying a lot of it with my students. Now that I have a good understanding of the basics and what is actually in the resource, I want to spend the summer revamping my ELA 10 course to increase student engagement while still incorporating the close reads and text based questions from StudySync. I’m also part of a team working to select novels to go with StudySync. That means that this summer, my district is buying a bunch of YA novels from diverse authors for me to read and review focused on the theme of Taking a Stand. We had our first meeting and selected 10 novels today. It was wonderful.
   2. I have been working with the National Writing Project’s College, Career, and Community Ready Writers Program (C3WP) for two full years now to improve how I teach argument writing, and to help provide professional development to other teachers looking to improve in this area as well. With the new curriculum last year, I did not get to use as much of the C3WP material as I would have liked. Re-incorporating at least 4 of the mini-units in my 10th grade classes and 2 or 3 in my 11th grade classes will be another goal for the summer.
   3. I really strongly believe in teaching grammar in the context of students’ own writing, and I need to work on fitting that in alongside our new curriculum more cohesively. I did a little at the end of the year this year, but it definitely needs to be more of a priority throughout the school year next year.
4. As the National Writing Project says, the best teachers of writing are teachers who write. I want to work on writing a lot this summer. I would like to do one more edit on my “finished” fantasy novel, and start querying agents-is that even the right phrase? Then I would like to finish the sequel that goes with that novel, and maybe even finish my long-languishing YA historical fiction novel as well. It’s been two thirds of the way done for almost seven years now. I’ve also really rediscovered my passion for poetry since trying to do the 30 poems in 30 days challenge in April, so I’d like to keep up with that as well.

Those are my main priorities for my “summer off.” I’m sure there are more, and I know that I may not get through all of them, but I feel very motivated and inspired to learn!