Summer Workation

Summer Workation has no news yet.

What issue will your venture address?

For 15-25% of the year, teachers are on summer vacation. Unfortunately during this time talented teachers often engage in suboptimal opportunities that offer minimal compensation or personal/professional development. Furthermore, the process to find these opportunities is inefficient and dependent upon disorganized information. This missed opportunity comes at a time when organizations like the Gates Foundation have recognized effective teachers as paramount for student success. Nevertheless, teachers and scholars have criticized traditional professional development practices as ineffective. Having recognized this inefficiency, our hope is to change the status quo, while helping teachers grow and become better educators.

Why are you pursuing this specific issue?

At the student level the transformative powers of summers are well identified. Communities increasingly invest in student summers. The hope is that students prevent learning loss and spend the summer growing. Detrimentally, the same services do not exist for teachers. In short, the status quo inefficiently handles teachers’ summers, which represents a real missed opportunity. We believe that summer workations will fill this gap by providing teachers with meaningful experiences that they can bring back to the classroom. In doing so, teachers arrive refreshed, recharged, and ready to tackle the new school year, inevitably leading to better student outcomes.

How will your venture solve this problem?

Summer Workation helps teachers find, assess and secure the best summer opportunities. We utilize web 2.0 technologies and rigorous research to help teachers utilize the summer to become better educators. To optimize teacher summers we employ two primary tools: the Workation Portal, a niche job board (like Monster.com) used to centralize, organize and disseminate specific summertime opportunities, and Career Support Services, where teachers can receive personalized resume and cover letter help from career specialists. Our goal is to create an online platform that can be harnessed by every teacher whether they are tech savvy or new to the internet.