Without intentional pause to reflect and strengthen our practices, teaching risks becoming a cycle of repetition rather than a process of evolution. Though many joke teaching is easy because of “summers off,” it’s during the summer that educators have the most time to step back, analyze the year, discover innovative pedagogy, and redesign lessons for greater student engagement and impact.

Summer is the time that educators say, “When I re-enter the learning space, I want to enter it better.”

I always feel a tinge of pride when students are impressed that the Youtube video we are about to watch is mine. “You made this?!” and “Is that you?” they ask when they see my hands demonstrate inking, cutting, and labelling the backs of the words of my model haiku. I’ll never forget one student who, seeing that the video I made had not gone viral as he perhaps assumed most videos did, exclaimed, “One view?!”

I felt a tug of anxiety in my chest and thought silently to myself, “How can I steer them towards drawing artifacts instead?” I have years of experience creating and teaching young people drawing, painting, collaging, and photography, but despite some sculptural experience both personally and instructionally, I have never felt very comfortable making three-dimensional art, especially with clay.

Ms. Jones’s 4th-grade ELA students transformed the short story "All Summer in a Day" by Ray Bradbury into a comic. The objective was to show as a six-panel comic an important moment in the science-fiction tale, when the sun finally comes out for one hour after seven years of rainstorms.