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How do I best allocate and use time to situate learners to experience Deeper Learning?

Kelley McKaig
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by Matt Thompson, NTN Staff

 

SCHEDULING, MAPPING & SEQUENCING: ALLOCATING AND USING TIME IN AN NTN SCHOOL

(SECONDARY VERSION)

 

 

DRIVING QUESTION: How do you allocate and use time to best situate learners* to create and experience Deeper Learning in a safe, inclusive, emotionally supportive culture? (* includes staff)

WHY THIS MATTERS

“Structures drive behavior. Organized one way we can be inventive and cooperative; organized in a different way we are uninventive and uncooperative...  It’s not about individual performance; it’s about the system. It doesn’t make sense to focus on ‘teacher effectiveness’ without a focus on building a coherent system. As W. Edward Deming said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.’” - excerpt from this Tom Vander Ark article

The strategic use of time in a school can be an elusive opportunity for improving learning. It’s made more complex by conflicting priorities and constraints that can be at odds with your goals for learning. All of the noise can result in a master schedule and/or bell schedule that don’t serve the central purpose of the school, and a system that makes it overly difficult for teachers to integrate deeper learning experiences. 

Over time, NTN has seen time structures that form a coherent, aligned system around staff and students - this consistently leads to better outcomes. Below are some resources, examples, and recommendations to support your own thinking about your allocation and use of time in your school in support of the learning you desire.

NTN_Logo_2_copy.gif      NTN RECOMMENDATIONS:      

 

 

1.    Know Your Purpose And Center It In Your Scheduling (click to expand)

The master schedule and bell schedule should be a reflection of your school’s purpose, to the point that an educator unfamiliar with your school could look at your schedules and discern key elements of your school’s purpose, what you value and what you don’t value as much. Scheduling well first requires being clear about your desired student outcomes and how you plan to get them there.

A common challenge is that leaders might schedule with adults in mind, not students (and even less so, purpose). And that's why it's perceived as "hard." When everyone knows the priority in schedule planning is driven by purpose and by students, it's slightly easier to swallow what is sure to be bad news for someone. The sooner leaders attend to those challenging conversations - even if they aren't in ink/simulation yet - the better. (Bad news tends to spoil on the shelf - savvy leaders find a way to deliver it ASAP.)

Resources:

 

2.  Collaborative Adult Learning Time Embedded Within the Daily Schedule (click to expand)

Teachers need their individual planning time AND they also need collaborative adult learning spaces. Integrating meaningful and sustainable change in instructional practice requires space for adults to:

  • Continue learning about specific deeper learning strategies and to see those strategies modeled
  • Practice those strategies in a safe environment of peers
  • Reflect with peers on classroom efforts to integrate new instructional practice
  • Look at student data, including student work, to understand the impact of new instructional practices
  • Refine instructional practice based on data

This happens more effectively and realistically when embedded in the school day itself, and preferably in longer blocks of collaborative time (75+ minutes). 30- or 45-minute staff meetings before or after school don’t allow for sufficient time to institute the above practices (see bullet points) with the required degree of depth. 

Resources:

 

 

3.  Integrated / Team-Taught Courses with Shared Planning Time (click to expand)

New Tech defines team teaching as the collaboration of two or more certified teachers working together as a team to co-facilitate a course. By integrating subjects together, the course better reflects the way content and projects work in the world, with many subjects seamlessly working as a whole rather than siloed only in a single discipline. The team-taught integrated courses create benefits for instructional design, instructional practice, and culture building, not just in the course, but in the entire school.

Logistically, to be clear, this is doubling the number of students that will be with 2 teachers in one integrated classroom. It is imperative that the team of two teachers shares a common planning time to prepare for their integrated course. 

Resources:

 

 

4.  Longer Blocks of Student Learning (75+ min blocks) (click to expand)

“The product of deeper learning is transferable knowledge, including content knowledge in a domain and knowledge of how, why, and when to apply this knowledge to answer questions and solve problems.” - National Research Council 2012

To develop transferable knowledge, students need time to ask questions, be supported through active scaffolding, to practice/play with new ideas and concepts, and to attempt to transfer those new ideas toward a different context (provided by the project!). We see this happen most effectively when that cycle happens without interruption. And this can occur in 75+ minute blocks, but gets interrupted in 45-50 minute periods. 

While PBL can be done in 45-50 minute periods, we find that the longer continuous blocks of time offer students a more seamless, less fragmented experience. And, plainly, there is significantly more instructional time.  It also affords teachers a richer, performance assessment opportunity to see how well students understand a new idea/concept/skill, their ability (or not) to transfer that understanding. Performance assessment, a key component of PBL, requires the necessary time for students to write/create/perform/build without interruption.

Many NTN schools approach this through using some version of a Modified Block schedule which includes both 90-minute periods and 45-minute periods. 

Resources:

 

 

5.  Dedicated Time for Building a Safe, Inclusive, Emotionally Supportive Culture (click to expand)

Because cognitive function is all tied up in how a person is experiencing their environment, NTN believes in dedicated time for building a safe, inclusive, and emotionally supportive culture. We offer a range of strategies for teachers to build that in the classroom experience. 

And, importantly, we believe schools also need to allocate times where culture-building is THE focal point. NTN schools tackle this through a range of structures, including examples like:

  • Regular “family time” gatherings where connection is encouraged, celebration is central, and familiar rituals bring the community together.
  • Advisory and advisory-like structures (e.g. homeroom) that focus on Social Emotional Learning, and chances for personalized conversations and check-in’s. These might occur daily or weekly. 

Resources:

 

ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS

In addition to the above recommendations, the following considerations have had an impact on NTN schools’ abilities to scale up and sustain deeper learning practices like PBL.

Limit Teacher Preps to 3 or Less (ideally 2 or less)

Planning for and implementing quality PBL requires an additional planning load for teachers new to this form of instruction. Keeping the number of teacher preps to a minimum will position your teachers to be more successful in their early attempts at PBL. 

Over a couple of years, as teachers build a bank of projects and expertise in the PBL instructional model, they will be more capable of shifting more preps to PBL. 

As part of an effort to limit preps, consider getting tight with your school purpose and what you choose to offer and not offer - see Scheduling 101: Mapping Four Years.

*For very small schools with low student enrollment, a higher number of preps can be unavoidable based on available FTEs. Considerations might include choosing some courses to be non-PBL, and potentially exploring trimesters or semester courses. Also see above resource on Mapping Four Years. 

If Shared Campus, Avoid Teachers Teaching In and Out of NTN Model

If a shared campus, it can offer flexibility in the larger school schedule to have teachers teaching in both NTN classes and non-NTN classes. In our experience, this comes with a noticeable cost. These teachers struggle with mixed messages around instruction (often leading to watered down PBL), can lose connection to your goals for Deeper Learning, and can lose connection to the specific NTN staff and its culture. 

While best for teachers not to move in and out of the NTN experience in a shared campus model, it is often necessary for students to. Consider how students might crossover or “passport” in and out of the NTN experience (e.g. to take certain electives). Check out Scheduling 104: Crossovers.

Protect Schedule Structures Held Sacred by Your School Community

There are often prized programs that play an outsized role in the identity of your school as a whole. Where possible (without sacrificing student learning potential), try to protect these programs and the schedule structures that have allowed their success. If the NTN implementation interferes with or deteriorates the quality of one of these programs, that could reduce overall buy-in and spell doom for your overall efforts at PBL.

 

For more examples of Bell and Master Schedules go to: Master and Bell Schedule Examples

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