Tips for Teaching in the Summer
Whether you’re teaching summer school in your own district, running a small tutoring business over Zoom, teaching other educators in professional learning sessions, or taking on a role as a camp counselor, many teachers don’t stop teaching on the last day of the school year. Here are a few tips for keeping students engaged and motivated during summer learning:
Get Outside
If possible, take your students outside to learn under the sun! It’s understandable that students would feel distracted during summer classes when they’d rather be outside enjoying the weather. Embrace the season and the flexibility that summer school, camps, and tutoring often offer by learning in an alternative environment. It could be as simple as taking your already-scheduled lesson out of doors, or you could restructure a lesson to incorporate your environment as part of the learning experience.
For example, educator Skylar Primm uses the outdoors to introduce his students to phenology, or the study of the changing seasons. Phenology activities can support ELA and science.
Use this worksheet to have your students make thoughtful observations about changes they see around them throughout the summer:
Communicate with Families
Even though the summer term is short, it’s important to establish a reliable line of communication with parents for any summer learning program. Of course, for programs like tutoring and day camps, parents may naturally be involved in student progress and even attend a celebration or demonstration of learning at the end of the summer. For a summer school program through your school district, establishing that relationship with parents may be a bit trickier. Try making a phone call or sending an email right at the beginning of the summer to set a foundation for transparency and engagement. For more tips on family communication, see:
Use Project-Based Learning
The brevity of the summer term (and the fickle attention spans of your students) may be a good match for project-based learning. Working on one detailed, overarching project throughout the summer can help your students stay motivated. Projects can also offer students alternative, hands-on, collaborative options for displaying their growth. At the end of the summer, invite families to a celebration where students showcase the cumulative effect of their learning through finished projects.
Educator and summer tutor Dana Garth recommends project-based learning in a real-world context for summer:
“Engage students in project-based learning as a way for them to apply what they’ve learned in a real-world way. Summer is usually associated with having fun, and some students may not be excited about attending summer school. Including projects and real-life learning experiences can help! Summer school students are usually chosen based on low-performing test scores, so creating a different school experience is important for these learners.”
Get to Know Your Students
Taking just a bit of time to learn about your students’ interests, goals, and what makes them who they are will help you reach them with meaningful learning experiences and address behavior or motivation issues more effectively. Educator Skylar Primm, who teaches summer camp in addition to being a classroom teacher, writes:
“Even if you have limited time with students in the summer, relationships still matter! Taking the time to get to know your summer students in the small moments throughout your days together will help you keep them motivated for the longer run.”
These student surveys, designed for the first day of the school year, can serve as a quick way to learn a bit about your students on the first day of summer school, camp, or tutoring:
Make Content Relevant
It’s always important to make content relevant to students’ lives. During the summer months, relevance is a particularly important driver for engagement. If you are working with smaller groups of students or one-on-one, use what you learn about student interests, goals, and backgrounds to inform your content selection and lesson design. Community engagement, like a service learning project, inviting community members to the classroom to talk about career paths, or collaborating with your local library or coffee shop to create an authentic audience for student work can also be a powerful tool. Those beyond-school (or camp) connections help students see the relevance of what they’re learning and translate their academic goals to a real-world context.
If your students are enrolled in summer school or tutoring because of low grades during the school year, let summer be a time for them to reclaim a sense of ownership over their learning by weaving strands of their identity into their work and drawing connections between school and what they want to be when they grow up. In addition to closing their achievement gaps, summer may become a time where they even find joy in learning!
Play Games
To keep students motivated in the summer, you’re going to need all the tricks up your sleeve — including game-based learning! Play outside games, online games, collaborative team games, or simply gamify elements of individual student learning. When implemented with purpose and in alignment with what we know about cognitive science, games can have a significant impact on student engagement. In his blog on game-based learning, educator John Meehan writes that games are most powerful when they encourage empathy, collaboration, and teamwork. If you have a small group of students in your summer school class or camp, consider how a thoughtfully-designed game could enable them to interact with content in new ways while socializing with peers, an activity that many students covet during the summer months.
Collaborate with Other Teachers
If possible, get creative with the other educators in your camp, school, or colleagues involved with your tutoring program. Collaborate with other classes to form teams for games, have other students and teachers form an authentic audience for student work, or simply join up groups of students for projects and lessons. The flexible nature of some summer programs may allow students to form connections with other students that they may not cross paths with during the school year — such as from other grades or other schools within their district. If student-to-student collaboration across groups isn’t feasible, don’t discount the power of pulling up with another educator in your program just to brainstorm for fifteen minutes.
For more on collaborating with colleagues, see this post on co-teaching from an educator guest blogger:
Experiment with Innovative Tech
Learn with your students by trying out some new education technology. If you’re teaching middle or high school math, try our free Augmented Reality app. ALEKS is an adaptive digital tool that identifies a student’s individual gaps in learning and delivers exactly what they need to learn next. Redbird Math is also a digital personalized learning tool that includes gamification and project-based learning. Finally, Rise was designed specifically to target learning loss in math and ELA for grades K-8.
For free resources to use in your classroom, camp, Zoom room, or home, see:
