As our fellow school superintendents across the state consider their budget priorities, we urge them to consider investing in summer learning programs, a cost-effective, yet highly impactful strategy to help achieve their school district’s most pressing priorities.
In our own districts, we’ve seen firsthand that summer learning programs are key to advancing some of our top priorities, including Common Core implementation, supporting students’ social-emotional growth and enhancing teacher/staff professional development.
In a new series of reports, Putting Summer to Work: the Development of High-Quality Summer Learning Programs in California, the Summer Matters campaign profiles summer learning in our school districts and explores how high-quality summer learning programs have enriched students and teachers alike, and prevented “summer learning loss” among students from low-income families and English Language Learners.
For example, our teachers are using the summer months as learning laboratories for Common Core implementation. Summer learning programs give our educators a unique opportunity to experiment with new lesson plans and assess their effectiveness in low-pressure, but very genuine, learning environments. All our summer programs use project-based learning to better engage and motivate students, a strategy consistent with the Common Core that challenges our teachers to change their practices.
Credentialed teachers used the summer learning programs they led to try out new teaching approaches that they are now repeating and sharing with other teachers during the school year. From gardening projects to summer robotics classes, our teachers practiced techniques to