If you are a special educator and have reached the last day of school, congratulations! Another school year is complete!

At some time during this month all schools that follow a traditional calendar will provide a summer break of several weeks. Schools who follow year-round calendars will also have break, typically in August. In all situations, the special educator will have an extended time to have a break from teaching.

There are a plethora of articles for teachers describing similar ways to spend this break — all of them being worthwhile ideas. It's important to rest, to finally give attention to home and family activities that have waited throughout the year, to spend time in professional development, to reflect on the previous year and to plan for the next school year.

One area of personal and professional development that will help you to strengthen your thinking and teach you about walking in the shoes of a student with diagnosed learning disabilities is to learn something new. When I say learn something new, I don't just mean try something new. I mean really learn something you have never learned before from start to finish.

You may even want to walk yourself through the steps you use to develop IEP goals for your student. After choosing what you will learn and who will teach you, give yourself a pre-evaluation. How did you do? What goals can you write for your learning? Will you want to learn your new skill at 80 percent accuracy? Or will you want closer to 100 percent accuracy?

Choose what your ending evaluation and criteria will be. Decide on the length of time to complete your goals. Now start learning your new skill.

As you are progressing through learning your new skill, it may be worthwhile to keep a journal of how your learning is going. You may also want to consider in what way the learning and error-making you are experiencing reflect the behaviors you may see in the students that you teach.

This may become an experience you can share with your students at a later time as they are learning something new and you guide them through the tenacity it takes to stick with the learning to completion.

You can provide a story from your summer learning of how when you wanted to give up you instead kept going and communicated to your teacher your frustrations. Your teacher then may have adapted his teaching so you learned in a different way.

As you share your stories of how you learned, your students can commiserate with you. This may lead to a greater student-teacher relationship, as well as a way to explore problem-solving when a student feels frustrated about learning.

The act of learning something new from start to finish will provide opportunities to understand in a way that just reading about how a student learns may omit. Many excellent authors have written, blogged, developed websites and webinars to teach teachers about the brain and learning. Some authors that can be explored while on summer break may be Eric Jensen, Patricia Wolfe or Judy Willis.

These authors — and many like them — offer great resources for teaching students, using the best brain research available, in brain-based learning. Their explanations will help you understand why when you are learning your new task you develop a headache, are tired, may feel like quitting, or may decide it's worth paying someone else to do this task for you.

They will explain what part of the brain was involved in your learning, your ability to keep learning even when it was hard, and the parts of the brain that helped you to feel accomplishment at completion. Research is readily available for teachers to understand the cognitive changes occurring in students' brains and the importance for special educators to choose wisely as educational decisions are being made daily.

It is a good goal to spend time learning new skills while on summer break. It is even more worthwhile to understand what students with diagnosed learning disabilities feel during their school days as they learn. As special educators experience these frustrations firsthand, it will develop ways to teach that are effective, and demonstrate for our students a greater understanding of the complexities of learning.