Do We Have To?: Making the Most of Summer Training

Summer vacation might be widely perceived—outside of education, anyway—as time off for teachers, but even if you don’t have a second job, attending required training can make the break feel almost as busy as the school year. Without an extended pause to recharge, many teachers feel understandably resentful about that training, particularly if it’s mandated rather than suggested.

While many summer training sessions are certainly useful and set us up for success with new challenges like curriculum updates or moves into leadership roles, the reality is that not every learning experience clearly addresses our needs in the most responsive and practical way. We can’t control the directives we’re handed, but we can still make the most of these “voluntold” days of learning by embracing the mindset that we all have room to grow, and that much can be gained from any opportunity to engage in reflection about teaching practice. It’s certainly possible for schools to provide more flexibility in professional learning, but we can find ways to get something useful from whatever is presented.

Curriculum Updates

Particularly in large districts, curriculum changes should be added to death, taxes, and childbirth on the list of life’s constants. A few factors drive these changes, including shifts in state requirements: One year, districts might be adjusting to a new interventions program for Tier 3 instruction, and the next they might be asked to align Tier 1 curricula with revised state standards or updated pacing guides. Even when such changes are frustrating, though, it helps to look for a practical payoff—curriculum updates can present clearer materials, stronger alignment to current research, and a chance to reset habits that no longer serve students well.

What makes a curriculum session worthwhile is less about new materials and more about how you actively seek connections between the content and your own work by focusing on problems of practice or exploring new instructional strategies. For example, if the curriculum trainer introduces a routine for rereading a passage with a partner, you can use the time in the session to determine how the routine serves the needs of students by applying the approach to specific scenarios that arise regularly in the classroom, such as using the strategy to support anyone who struggles to read independently.

When we work to find tangible links between theory and practice, training becomes more valuable because it offers concrete moves to try with our students once the school year begins, not just hypothetical ideas. In other words, the most useful sessions connect resources to a challenge we already know our students have, so we can seek out those correlations to make the time useful.

Certification Requirements

Sometimes summer learning is less about program shifts and more about compliance. You may need extra credits for certification, recertification, or license renewal, and the summer is the only realistic window to complete these requirements without the competing demands of students, grading, and after-school responsibilities. In these cases, the goal is not to fall in love with every session, but rather to make the process as painless and useful as possible.

Even required credit-bearing sessions are beneficial when they help to sharpen a specific aspect of teaching, such as serving students who come to class with a layered set of needs. A course about teaching multilingual learners might begin as a certification requirement, but if you take a more active stance by envisioning the names and faces of the students who have sat in your classroom, you develop a stronger understanding of how to effectively provide targeted support that results in growth.

For example, if you jot down the challenges that come with differentiating to increase language production among multilingual students, the certification training opens up considerations around how to adjust class discussions so that all students have a chance to participate. The practical payoff of this experience then becomes not the credit itself, but the fact that you have applied the learning to a self-identified teaching challenge by adding tools to your repertoire that make teaching and learning smoother and more responsive.

Opportunities for Promotion

Leadership training is usually required for anyone who is interested in taking a role in school or district administration, and when well executed, these opportunities can help participants better understand school systems, communicate with colleagues, or support new teachers in ways that improve the whole building. Furthermore, looking at education through a different lens allows us to see our own work more clearly and explore approaches that make us more effective, even if the training itself is less than ideal. Professional learning can also serve a longer-term goal, especially if you do decide to move toward coaching, department leadership, or administration. Early in that transition, required courses may feel like extra hoops, but they can help you learn the language, expectations, and responsibilities of a less familiar professional role.

To get the most from leadership training, it helps if you take the reins of your own learning by focusing on one piece of information that will come in handy as you transition to a new role. For example, when I began making the transition to school leadership, there were a number of courses that I had to take in order to be an ideal candidate for promotion. One of them centered on the observation and analysis of teaching, and that class taught me how to do effective “scripting”—writing down everything a teacher says verbatim as a data collection protocol—and how to record important information, like tallying which students spoke and how often, so that post-observation conversations about equitable participation were built on solid data rather than subjective impressions.

By zeroing in on this practical method of gathering real-time classroom data, I was more actively engaged in the training and found a way to share worthwhile information with teachers in post-observation conversations.

Learning New Skills

The best summer learning experiences do more than check a box; they introduce us to an approach, tool, or strategy that changes how we teach once the year begins. Last year, I spoke to a teacher in my district who had returned from a reading workshop excited about explicit phonics instruction, and that enthusiasm mattered because the training gave her both knowledge and a renewed sense of purpose. Her active engagement in the session made all the difference; rather than passively receiving information, she was thinking about how to help her students in specific ways.

Furthermore, learning new skills often builds upon concepts that are already familiar but address growing challenges in classroom settings, such as students’ lack of engagement. Participants who come to a session with an attitude of “been there, done that” are less likely to be satisfied than those who believe that there is always more to learn. For example, if you have noticed that only a small group of students answer every question, and you come with a solutions-oriented mindset to a session that models how to scaffold partner talk and determine a structure for warm calling responses, you will see a lot of relevance in that session. Moments like this are when professional learning feels authentic, because we take the initiative to decide what could genuinely change the atmosphere of our classroom.

Summer training might be compulsory, but you can make both positive and less helpful learning experiences meaningful by arriving ready to ask questions, looking for at least one practical takeaway, and connecting the content to your professional needs. It also helps to give yourself credit for showing up under less-than-ideal circumstances. Required learning during the summer is not the same as a true break, and it’s reasonable to feel annoyed about that. Still, the benefits are indisputable if we actively seek opportunities that allow us to leave with useful ideas and a clearer understanding of our students.