And, this rebuilding is "cognitive, conceptual" i.e., in the realm of memory, idea integration and consciousness.
The building metaphor fits…but, if the wind-down from the stress and attention of the school year is followed by relaxation and release; insights and ideas can grow. After an academic and cognitive year… relaxation and reverie seem like a caravan that requires respite and recharging at an oasis.
The cognitive rebuilding is "foundation work." It is the cognitive restructuring needed to shore up the underpinnings of thought and professional performance.
This building should avoid research and study. Focus and concentration are inferior to musing, daydreaming, puzzling over memories, napping, and incubating meaning.
The idea (or blueprint) for building this cognitive foundation is simmer and stew the experiences of the prior school year, making meaningful connections, anchoring ideas to the foundation that support them.
In this way, when the foundation is renovated, remodeled with a fuller immersion and enriching experience, the professional cognitive framework is enriched, too.
This process is a collaborations and integration of internal professional talents and skill-states.
Not Generally Noticed
The layering of complexity during the integration of knowledge, skill and ability is a naturally occurring process that results (over time and through application and practice) into an integrations that can be called an "expert"level of performance. This process creaks along, usually unnoticed due to the flurry, scurry and stress of the daily grind's hubbub.
But, if you can sit back, relax, catch your breath, and just think-feel-be; you can reunite the visceral, mental, emotional learning.
The process accelerates, streamlines itself, if you avoid imposing pre-sets; and if you pose "What if's?", "What caused?", and "What happened?" questions…Instead of trying to squeeze or contort (or reject outlying information that doesn't fit the pat answer), instead of trying to align experience to the "current jargon-theory" about education; listen to your experience, and really learn about how to teach, communicate, relate to your students.
For example, at one time, chemical elements were considered to be a simple atom. Later, atoms were understood to be composed of three building blocks (i.e., protons, neutrons and electrons). Now, the building blocks are known to be composed of building blocks of their own…and some parts are even defined as left-handed, right-handed…and there are hints that certain building blocks may "pop in and out" of the material universe.
Mater once was simple, i.e., it existed or not. Now, there may be "dark matter," "anti-matter" "proto-matter," and who knows?
Light was once a beam, then a particle wave, then both. Light was thought to be a phenomena, but now evidence suggests that light seems to respond (be influences, interact) be self-aware of the people who are observing it.
And at one time, Light was the absolute, fastest movement. Now, evidence suggests that the entire observable Universe grew to 85% of its current size in a few billionths (13) of a second. This means that the first light from one side of the infant Universe would take hundreds of millions of years to reach meet the light from the other side, and hundreds of millions of years to reach the far side. Clearly, this "super-bang" process occurred faster than the speed of light.
So, when older and existing theories no longer satisfy; constellations of thought and experience "morph" into theories that provide more useful explanations…explanations that provide greater accuracy for driving application, performance and achievement.
A Contemplative, Meditative, Reverie Process
Contemplation, meditation, reverie, daydreams…these activities (altered states of awareness?) contain the spark of creativity, the current of intuition, the incubation of ideas that knits, sews, folds, hems and resizes the cognitive foundation that next year's activities will be build on.
And, rather than stressing over how the fabric of these thoughts and insights will come together, the gentle art of intention is all that is required.
Intending that insight and understanding will resolve in the images, sounds, flashes and prompts of imagination is sufficient to launch this innate capacity.
Sufficient that is, if the process is free, unhindered, allowed to range wherever, allowed to roam without tether, untied to theory and previous learning.
And with the freedom to become whatever these open-ended thought processes create, the magic of ideas takes form in specific insights and objective reality.
In summary: Relax, trust your internal capacity for creativity, insight, intuition and problem-solving.
You may amaze yourself at your ideas. And, you won't let yourself down.
