3 Tips for Scheduling Strategically This Year
January is a time for resolutions. It is also the time of the year that many schools start to ramp up efforts to design and build schedules for the upcoming school year. This year, we invite school and district leaders to bring these two practices together this year and resolve to approach the school scheduling process strategically.
What does that look like? Here are three tips for approaching the school scheduling process strategically from our upcoming book, It’s Time for Strategic Scheduling: How to Design Smarter K-12 Schedules That Are Great for Students, Staff, and the Budget (ASCD), which will be published in Summer '23 and is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
Tip #1: Approach Scheduling as a Team Sport
Creating a great schedule is hard. No one person has all the wisdom, expertise, authority, and data necessary to build the best schedule by themselves. What’s more, changing a schedule from something that is traditional, cumbersome, inefficient, and inequitable can be a political minefield. Excluding important stakeholders—especially teachers—from scheduling discussions can easily undermine support for a new and better schedule.
Taking a team approach to scheduling can ensure priorities are clear before schedules are built and challenges can be addressed collaboratively along the way. The most successful teams are composed of the following members performing the following roles:
District assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, to set overall direction, goals, and priorities for schedules across schools in the district and provide scheduling guidelines and parameters.
School principal, to set the school’s scheduling direction, goals, and priorities and work closely with the district assistant superintendent of teaching and learning to align on vision.
Guidance counselor or assistant principal, to manage logistics, process, and keep things on track.
General education teachers, preferably teaching core subject(s), who provide input on scheduling decisions and tradeoffs from the perspective of general education instruction.
Special education and/or English Learner teacher, to provide input on scheduling decisions and tradeoffs from the perspective of student supports.
Expert scheduler, either school-based or district-based, to use scheduling software to build student and teacher schedules.
Tip #2: Align the Scheduling Process with Staffing and Budgeting Timelines
Schedules are not built in a vacuum. They are greatly influenced by staffing and budgeting decisions, and they can greatly affect staffing and budgeting decisions in return.
In many districts, the interplay between these three processes goes something like this: preliminary budgets are set in early winter, followed by staffing allocations, and schedules are created last. The trouble with this is the budget and staff a school is given may not actually align with how it wants to use time in the schedule.
A more strategic approach is to flip the order: start by designing the ideal schedule, including setting course offerings, section counts, and staffing needs, and then firm up staffing decisions, which should inform budgets. Student course selections and estimates of the number of students needing intervention should come first. Draft schedules next, and budgeting and staffing decisions follow after that. Schedules should be finalized based on budget decisions, but final schedules should closely resemble the desired ones.
Tip #3: Leverage a Scheduling Expert
Building great schedules requires both a great plan as well as an expert scheduler to bring the plan to life. One without the other leads to frustration and missed opportunities.
Designing a schedule (i.e., determining what to schedule) requires a different set of skills than does building a schedule (i.e., creating the actual schedules of staff and students on paper or in a software program). Designing a schedule requires teamwork, as we have noted; building a schedule that maximizes student choice and staff reach requires a certain degree of technical expertise. When schools or districts rely on inexperienced or untrained school leaders to build schedules, they do so at their own peril.
Expert schedulers can ensure student needs and requests are met, that staff are used efficiently, and that the schedule aligns with the leaders’ vision and priorities. There are multiple ways to find an expert scheduler:
Look inside the school. Sometimes an expert scheduler is hiding in plain sight. Rather than assume that the expertise aligns to title (principal, assistant principal, guidance counselor), ask your staff. At some schools, it is a math teacher who builds the schedule and receives a stipend to do so.
Look to other principals in the district. Not every principal is an expert scheduler, but some are. A growing number of districts are asking the principal of one school to take the lead in scheduling other schools.
Look to other district resources. Some districts employ a full- or part-time scheduling expert to support schools or identify a particular district leader or school-based staff member with the necessary expertise.
Hire an expert. There are a small number of individual consultants and scheduling “gurus” who help build schedules for a living. Talk with local or peer districts to see if they use an outside partner.
Get software and an expert as a package for secondary schools. Many expert schedulers are linked to a particular software package. It is unfortunately common for the outside expert you have identified and want to work with not be familiar with the program your school uses. A few firms do package scheduling software with expert support and training. Just keep in mind that if someone is not an expert scheduler, new software will not make them one.
Strategic School Scheduling Can Make a Big Impact for Students, Teachers, and the Budget
Taking a more strategic approach to the scheduling process can help build buy-in for changes and design a schedule that raises achievement, increases student engagement, addresses learning loss, and maximizes the impact of staff within the existing budget.
Our free How-To Guide for Designing Strategic Secondary Schedules includes a Scheduling Process Self-Assessment to help schools quickly evaluate where there is room to improve the scheduling process to help create a more strategic school schedule.
