My friends and colleagues have frequently characterized me as overly optimistic, a quality that saw its apex in my approach to planning my summer projects. I always imagined producing multiple articles and completing overhauls of all the courses I would be teaching in the next school year. Thanks to the google machine, I now know that I am Panglossian. (“Panglossian” refers to an excessively optimistic view. According to an explanation on the Merriam-Webster website, “Dr. Pangloss was the pedantic old tutor in Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide. Pangloss was an incurable, albeit misguided, optimist who claimed that ‘all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.’”) However, as I look ahead to my first summer back as a full-time professor, I am taming my inner Dr. Pangloss and setting achievable goals for summer 2026. In this post, I will suggest an approach to setting attainable teaching goals for this summer. 

Set at Least One Self-Care Goal

As I shared in my post on April 9, it is not uncommon for law teachers to be feeling burned out at this time of year, and it is not like the grading process will be rejuvenating. Commencement festivities will help, but you need to plan time for relaxation, family, and friends. Frankly, if you do not explicitly build self-care time in, you are more likely to make less mindful relaxation choices. You earned some breaks. Plan and take them.

Set No more Than 2-3 Achievable Teaching Goals

You are more likely to achieve your teaching goals if you set only a few concrete and realistic goals. For example, “overhaul all my classes” is not a good goal. Consider, instead, something like “create two new NextGen Bar-like exercises for my ___________ course.”

One possibility is to use data. After you finish grading your finals, identify the aspect of your course that students did not learn as well as you had hoped (e.g., identifying and analyzing contract ambiguities) and set a goal to improve your teaching and assessment and feedback related to that aspect of the course. In the alternative, before the semester ends, consider asking your students to respond to this anonymous prompt: “What is one thing Professor ____________ can change in this class for the next time they/she/he teaches it?” Focus on one or two common suggestions (and consciously ignore mean or idiosyncratic comments), and pick one or two that, as detailed below, are consistent with your teaching philosophy.

Set Goals that Align with Your Teaching Philosophy

Larry Krieger’s important study of lawyer well-being teaches us that we are most likely to be happy with the work we are doing when the work is consistent with our values. For teachers, work on our teaching is consistent with our values only if we are working on an aspect of our teaching that we regard as critical to producing learning. (Of course, if you haven’t written a teaching philosophy, you can make that exercise one of your two goals for the summer. Feel free to send me (mschwartz@pacific.edu) your teaching philosophy if you are inclined to write one this summer and would like feedback.) 

Another way to make your goals align with your values is to ask yourself questions such as: (1) Do I care about achieving this goal? (2) Am I excited about working on this goal? (3) How will students benefit if I succeed in achieving this goal? 

Final Thoughts on Summer Teaching Goals

I wish you a relaxing, successful, and joyous summer, one during which you achieve a self-care goal, a teaching goal, and a scholarship goal.