Once in a while, you hear someone say—often in the context of the appropriate amount for a teacher’s salary—that teachers don’t work three months out of the year.
To many teachers, this idea is laughable.
Take, for example, the 100 St. Louis teachers who have been spending summer learning more about using STEM in their classes. Or the Virginia teachers taking part in the Virginia Center for Excellence in Teaching’s summer institute addressing the arts, humanities, interdisciplinary studies, and STEM. Or the New Jersey art teachers participating in the Artist/Teacher Institute at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., where they’ve been learning how to combine music with painting.
I asked teachers about their summertime professional development in Education Week Teacher‘s first Twitter chat Wednesday evening, held jointly with Education Week, as one of a slew of questions about improving summer learning for both students and teachers.
The chat explored the opportunities schools have created for their students during the summer, how to engage parents in that kind of learning, and what kinds of PD teachers have found most useful during the summer.
Here’s our highlight reel, courtesy of Storify: