Local View:
Summer assignments prep students for next year.
Here we are, at the end of another school year. Teachers are preparing final grades in Orange County, a time when educators look forward to some time off, and reflect on what did and did not work from the past year. Teachers sincerely hope their students understood and learned the material taught, which requires that they asked the best questions.
How can we as educators ensure that our students ask questions when they do not understand? A better question is how can we as educators give our students the confidence to ask questions when they do not understand? Perhaps a summer assignment should be considered.
Most Advanced Placement students return from the summer break with a summer assignment in hand, ready to turn in, and knowing it will be their first grade of the school year. It is sometimes viewed as busy work, giving teachers the opportunity to gain relief from covering material that would otherwise not be covered during the school year.
From the student’s perspective, it is sometimes the buzzkill to the perfect summer away from learning. But the best advantage of a summer assignment is the opportunity for students to be prepared for the school year and to discover what they might not know.
Consider a school’s decision to assign a novel as summer reading and have the student come up with a series of questions to be turned in on day one. Asking essential questions can set the expectation of learning for the school’s English Department. It also sets up students to read and think critically for their best performance from the start. Reviewing commonly missed questions can open the door for students to ask how they can read for better understanding.
A school’s decision to assign a grade-wide math packet for middleschool students, paired with a first-day questionnaire, can impact how students view their own readiness for new levels of math. Group reflection on the responses from the questionnaire can reveal to teachers, and to the students themselves, where a class is in understanding material and relieve early anxiety over an often-frightening subject.
A quick search through Google reveals that only a few Orange County schools use a summer assignment as an educational tool. Even fewer use it outside Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate programs. All students, advanced or not, can benefit from an effective summer assignment.
Even at the end of the school year, let’s continue to plan for student success. Let’s come together as facilitators of student learning to develop and implement a summer assignment for the benefit of our students throughout the next school year.