Why Summer Is Super Necessary for Teachers
Summer gives teachers what the school year rarely can: time to rest, rejuvenate, and reset before another year of helping students learn and grow.
By the time summer arrives, most teachers aren't just ready for a break.
We're ready to run.
The final weeks of the school year are a strange combination of exhaustion and determination—grading final assignments, wrapping up units, managing student behaviors that seem to worsen as summer approaches, attending meetings, completing paperwork, cleaning classrooms, communicating with families, and somehow still showing up every day with patience and positivity.
Teaching is one of the few professions where being mentally exhausted isn't enough to stop the work. You still have to think. You still have to care. You still have to be "with it."
Day after day. Month after month. Most of us spend the school year carrying hundreds of decisions, thousands of interactions, and countless responsibilities. Long after students leave for the day, lesson plans, grading, emails, and tomorrow's problems follow us home.
By June, we’re not looking for professional development (thanks admin).
We're looking for recovery.
That's why summer is super necessary. Not because we are lazy or don't want to work, but because we need Rest, Rejuvenation, and Reset.
Rest
Risking winning the 1st prize for The Understatement of the Year, I’ll say it anyway: Teaching is demanding work mentally and physically.
Every lesson requires planning. Every class requires attention. Every student interaction requires mental, emotional, and physical energy.
But the brain did not evolve to operate in overdrive every day for ten straight months. And summer provides something many teachers desperately need but rarely get enough of during the school year:
Rest.
Real rest. Not grading on the couch. Not answering emails before bed. Not squeezing personal relaxation in-between professional responsibilities.
Just rest.
Sleeping a little longer. Reading for pleasure. Sitting on the patio with a cup of coffee. Taking a walk without thinking about tomorrow's lesson plan.
Rest allows the brain and body to recover from months of continuous and strenuous demands. Thus, teacher recovery is productive.
Rejuvenation
If rest helps us recover, rejuvenation helps us reconnect.
During the school year, teachers spend most of their energy taking care of everyone else.
Summer creates space to remember who we are outside of the classroom. It might be travelers, gardeners, fishers, hikers, or theatre, concert, and sports event goers; maybe most of the above.
We want to spend quality time with our family, maybe learn something new, or simply enjoy a quiet afternoon doing absolutely nothing.
Whatever form it takes, rejuvenation restores the energy, enthusiasm, and creativity that teaching constantly demands of us.
Teachers don't just need time away from school. We need time spent doing things that make us feel alive.
Reset
This one is different. While rest helps us recover and rejuvenation recharge, resetting gets us ready. This doesn't mean spending all of July rewriting curriculum or building elaborate lesson plans. I would not wish that on anyone.
A reset can be much simpler than that. It can be about reflecting on what worked and thinking more deeply about what didn't. It may involve considering small changes that could make our next year better.
Maybe it's figuring out how we can talk less and let students do more.
Maybe it's finding new ways to increase student engagement.
Maybe it's committing to trying a few new classroom strategies.
But no matter what the one, two, three big professional summer goals we task ourselves with are, reset should not be about working all summer, but about returning with renewed purpose that makes coming back to school exciting.
The Summer Teachers Deserve
Teachers spend the school year helping students grow. Summer is the season when teachers get to do some growing of their own.
So if you're feeling exhausted right now, that's normal. If you're counting down the days, that's understandable. If you need a break, you've earned it.
Take that nap. Read that novel. Sit on your patio and stare blankly at whatever. Most importantly, spend quality time with the people you love and the things that remind you there's a whole world beyond the classroom.
Rest. Rejuvenate. Reset.
When you're ready to think about next year, I hope you'll check out my upcoming book High Impact Teaching Strategies: 100 Brain-Based Classroom Activities for Building Better Learners full of practical, classroom-tested HITS (High Impact Teaching Strategies) designed to increase engagement, strengthen learning, improve retention, and make teaching a little easier.
But not yet.
For now, enjoy your summer. You earned it.
BOOKS & TOOLS
Flashcards are okay but there's a better way. The Memory (or Mind) Palace Method is a powerful learning and memorization technique that when mastered allows a student to remember 10, 20, or even 30 vocabulary words or concepts (definitions included) with ease.
And, they actually remember what they learned using memory palaces! This series of lessons (which can be used as classroom handouts) walks students through creating their first memory palace, filling it with information they need to learn, and using it to train their memories. It also contains short readings, a video lesson, memory palace examples, and practice drills.
Fair Use
Feel free to use with your students. Please do not share it with other parties or use for profit. All rights by crushschool.com.
Equity-Promoting Classroom Poster. What does EQUITY in the classroom look like?
Everyone has a different start and finish line
Quality is more important that quantity
Understanding that diversity makes us stronger
Inclusion despite beliefs, appearances, and circumstances
Thoughtfulness lowers barriers and reduces biases
Yesterday's mistakes are today's learning agenda
You can teach your students about equity and make it a daily classroom practice using this inspirational poster, which also includes images that accompany the equity description. You can discuss each letter characteristic with your students as a way of introducing your inclusive classroom and display it prominently as a reminder that diversity makes the classroom community stronger.
In this classroom Mistakes are Expected, Respected, Inspected, Corrected!
Learned helplessness is a result of years of conditioning that mistakes are bad for learning. Nothing is further from the truth - some of the most powerful life lessons come from making mistakes, reflecting on them, and growing as a result.
This is a PNG Poster you can print and display in your classroom to encourage a culture of risk-taking and learning from mistakes.
In this 3- to 4-day lesson, designed for a high school Earth and Space Science classroom, student groups are assigned and investigate 4 leading solutions to the climate change crisis our planet is experiencing. Then, they are called upon to debate against each other to try to convince others that their solution is the most viable and provide counterarguments against other solutions. It’s an intellectual thunderdome in which students are encouraged to use science to attacks each others points of view on climate change but not character.
Why and how does this learning strategy work?
Rote memorization out; seeking answers and deeper learning in.
The debate-style approach to learning is engaging and motivating for learners, because they are challenged to use real evidence and their wits to outmaneuver their opposition.
Not only do they act as investigators, developing communication, collaboration, and argumentation skills but they learn about viable solutions to the climate change conundrum we all find ourselves in. They learn Earth and Space Science content while investigating and debating solutions to a real-world phenomenon, which is what the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for.
Student Learning and Performance Objectives:
Research multiple, complex climate change solutions to discover that the world is more complicated than a single TikTok trend.
Articulate scientific arguments with actual evidence.
Listen to opposing viewpoints, to hone "social awareness" skills.
Realize that climate change solutions are multi-faceted, messy, and require more than just good vibes.
Describe and support with, not mere belief but actual evidence, the leading climate solutions proposed by, not the coven of online witches but the scientific community.
What's included:
24 slides that introduce, explain, and guide the teacher and students
Detailed teacher notes on prep, main lesson, and follow up activities
General Lesson flow for teacher to follow to make it all seamless
A short and funny “hook” to increase student buy in
Detailed student directions
A list (research starter pack) of links to legit, scientific websites for students to use.
Group roles (team jobs) with descriptions of what each entails.
4 climate change solutions to assign to 4 different student groups
Student Learning and Performance Objectives
Detailed Grading Rubric to guide students and make assessment easy
Debate Day introduction and format description
Follow up discussion questions (reflection and debrief)
Retrieval Practice, Spaced Practice, and Mixed Practice (Interleaving).
Studying Hard is not the same as Studying Smart. This High Quality printable, digital (PNG) poster is a constant classroom reminder of best practices for teachers and learning the smart way for students.
Classroom Wall Collage designed to promote effective, research-based, active learning strategies. Consists of 6 categories:
Learn Actively (Active Learning Strategies to avoid passive learning)
Mistakes Are What It Takes to Learn (Promoting a classroom culture of making and learning from mistakes and why such learning is effective)
Don’t Junk It, Chunk It (How to use the brain chunking technique)
Make Practice Smart (How to use smart and intentional study strategies instead of regurgitating and cramming information)
Visualize to Internalize (Dual Coding Strategy)
Teach It To Others (How to use what you learn to teach others to in turn learn it on a deeper level)
Each category includes 2 or 3 more specific descriptions of how it should be used. And, it rhymes for extra swag and student retention!
A total of 21 posters. Upon payment, you will be directed to a Google Drive link, which gives you 24 hours to copy the folder containing all 21 images to your Google Drive to use for educational purposes only.
