Over the summer, students typically take a step back from schoolwork to relax, socialize, and have fun independent of school-related responsibilities. It is important to unwind but also not to forget the skills and information learned over the school year. As a result, schools assign summer work and projects in order to make sure that their kids continue to learn throughout the break. These projects should be teacher-designed in order to make sure that students do the right amount of work and critical thinking, but at the same time engage with what interests them.

A project that is designed by teachers forces students to do an amount and type of work that helps them keep learning. Many kids loathe summer work. If presented with a project that they must design themselves, there is a significant group who will not put their full effort into the task and produce a subpar final product. Not only will they have an unsatisfactory amount of work, but they will also not benefit from the brain activity that the project was designed to promote. Without structure and direction from a teacher, students can easily fall short of what is expected. Summer assignments fail in their intended purpose if students do not produce the quantity of work that benefits them, thus teacher direction is a logical way to create accountability and motivation.

Lack of quality is equally, if not more damaging than lack of quantity. Summer projects are assigned in order to keep students learning and engaging with new ideas and concepts, and critical thinking is particularly absent during the summer. Summer assignments seek to remedy that. A teacher may, for example, push a student to make connections that they would not make otherwise through the format of a project they assign. Summer projects also seek to reinforce information or processes learned during the school year, something which might not happen if the project assigned is student-designed. In many cases, a lack of critical thinking is not necessarily a result of laziness so much as lack of information and direction. Unless a teacher designs a project that has a student complete a specific task, students can miss out on the skills and information that their teacher wants to impart and reinforce.

The counter-argument is that with a teacher-led project, students lose the interest and fun factor that comes with fully independent learning. However, individual, exploratory projects can be open-ended and still teacher-designed. The freedom to create a project around a topic of interest is important, especially during the summer, and still achievable within the framework of a teacher's guidelines. The guidelines are only there to encourage the kind of thinking and learning that the schools intend.

Summer projects must be designed by teachers in order for students to do the quantity and quality of work that will help them stay smart over the summer, while still enjoying typical summertime freedom. A teacher's guidance helps create accountability and motivation to produce the right amount of work and encourage critical thinking, and teacher-designed projects do not have to mean a lack of fun. But above all, the risk of a summer spent without learning greatly outshadows the annoyance of a summer project where a teacher sets the ground rules.