Want Better Summer School? Less Testing, More Student Choice
I've worked in two different summer programs during my 12-year teaching career, and I've always been struck past the differences between them. Only mayhap I shouldn't be. In that location's a divergence in how this country treats students living in poverty versus kids from wealthier areas. And at that place's a lesson to be learned on how nosotros can create meliorate summer school for all.
For several years, I did summer school at the Title I charter schoolhouse where I teach. Attendance is required equally part of an extended school year.
Our "traditional" summer schoolhouse programme had its benefits.
For example, information technology got the kids out of their apartments for a while. For many of our students, peculiarly girls who were more likely to exist saddled with full-time care of younger siblings, that was a really important factor.
Perhaps most importantly, it was three weeks of the summer in which we knew nutrient-insecure students were getting at to the lowest degree one decent repast per mean solar day.
But despite these social benefits, there weren't a lot of bookish ones.
The kids by and large spent half of the four-hour twenty-four hours in English language classes and the other part working on math. Testing was the focus. We reviewed the previous form's standards, previewed the next, and hoped some of it would stick in two months. It mostly didn't.
Eventually, I got frustrated and went to work at a $three,000, 3-week private academic summer army camp. Needless to say, it was a dissimilar world. Kids spent their summer doing project-based learning in classes they'd chosen based on their interests. They had individualized, rather than standardized, goals. And each class had a flexible curriculum to allow for pupil-guided learning. Although information technology was less explicitly tied to Common Core standards, in that location was niggling doubt that these students were getting a far more rigorous and useful academic experience than their peers.
This story has a happy ending.
Afterward an authoritative change at my school, we became a little more open to changing the way nosotros'd always done things. 3 years of experience at the fancy camp taught me that many—though not all—of its advantages could be hands imported into our summer program. Student choice, project-based learning, arts classes … all of these are cheap and easy. And they make the process more rewarding for students and teachers than working our way through threescore pages of a test prep book.
Our program looks very different than earlier. Halfway through, kids are even so honing their close reading and textual prove skills, but now they're analyzing documents for a mock trial—Humpty Dumpty is suing the wall company for faulty structure. They're improving their writing past putting together a script for a musical, which they'll perform at the end of the programme. Math, science, and language arts are all components of the Create Your Own Restaurant grade. They're figuring out price points and site surveys for their bistros and food trucks. And we had to add actress sessions to the STEM Lab because it was so full.
A rewarding, rigorous, engaging summer plan shouldn't exist express to those who already accept all the academic advantages.
Diverting our money from test prep books into slime ingredients, prepare supplies, and legal pads has inverse our summer program. And I can already tell information technology has major payoff for the kids. They're engaged, focused, motivated … and they even so get that crucial schoolhouse luncheon every day.
Source: https://www.weareteachers.com/better-summer-school/
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