Summer Brings school for teachers

 

For the past two years many school teachers have taken online seminars over the summer to try and keep up with some continuing education which is required for most teachers. If you are like me, you take so much professional development you have extra hours to spare.

I begin next week taking something called Social Studies Workshop: Teaching Social Studies to ELLs which should help me engage my English language learners with history. This is put on by my district and we will be in class from 9-3, Monday through Thursday. I am excited.

The week after I will be in Orlando at the AVID conference. AVID is Achievement Via Individual Determination is a non-profit organization that provides professional learning for educators to close opportunity gaps and improve college and career readiness for high school and middle school students, especially those traditionally underrepresented in higher education.

I then return home until July 10 when I fly out to San Diego for a week at the University of California at San Diego to study SE Asian Art, which should help me formulate better lesson plans when my world history classes resume. 

The final week of the summer I will be in Washington, DC at the Cato Institute. Their Sphere Summit is for teachers to work on Teaching Civic Culture together. I attended the very first one and this one is more developed for secondary school students. They take applicants on a rolling basis and I am excited that I will be able to attend this program because of the valuable things I learned the last time I was in Washington. 

In between, I will spend as much time as I can outside, in the pool and yard and being with my dogs. Summer is a time for teachers to refresh but it is also a time for them to develop better lessons for their students. 

Any of those fools who think we have summers off should just walk a mile in a teacher's shoes. We all know that is not going to happen so have a great summer and I should be back the end of July or so with a column on how summer went and what we are preparing for in the fall. Enjoy!