Summer: Our Beautiful “Do Over”

This time of year I am always reminded what a beautiful gift summer is to educators.

Not just because of the beach time, time to rest and rejuvenate our passion for students.

Not just the extra time to spend with our children, families, and our friends.

Not just because we get to see what the rest of the world does during daylight hours and finally watch The Price is Right again.

No, there is another reason that the summer is a huge gift to educators. A really important reason. Even more important that daytime television.

What other profession in the world gets a yearly “do over”?

We get to take everything we learned this year, our failures and the challenges we faced that made us better educators, the successes we had because of our hard work, everything we did this year and all the preceding years and START OVER next year.

What a gift to us, what a gift to students. Of course, it is up to us to determine what value that gift will have in our classrooms, our schools, our districts. Here is what I plan to do between naps to make the most of summer for the benefit of students.

1. Read-books for fun, books for professional growth, blogs, articles, tweets, basically everything I can get my hands on.
2. Dream-by the pool, on vacation, at the park, dreams about the possibilities of the upcoming school year can strike anywhere. Being disconnected from daily distractions, we can focus on the forest instead of the trees and get innovative.
3. Connect-this will be my first summer as a “connected” educator, and I am excited to continue learning and being inspired by my PLN on Twitter, Voxer and through blogging. In addition to this, I will connect with colleagues in our school, district, and at conferences.
4. Plan-whether alone or working with colleagues, it is important to pick the dreams that bubble to the surface and make a plan to make them come true.
5. Write-I will reflect through writing about my learning in my professional life and personal life. Reflecting like this helps me be a better person and be more true to who I want to be. I hope my writing inspires others, but truth be told, it likely inspires me more than anyone else.

I hope we all enjoy plenty of fun and freedom this summer, and maybe our houses might get cleaned more than once a month. In addition to this, through intentionality we can also end the summer as even better educators. What will you do to take advantage of our beautiful “do over”?