How to Design a Strategic School Schedule for the “Post-Pandemic” World
During spring 2020 as a result of the pandemic, schools across the country changed schedules more quickly and radically than ever before. Now, two years later, many leaders and educators have the urge to “get back to normal” and return to pre-pandemic schedules—even though many of these schedules did not serve students well to begin with.
Now more than ever, it is crucial that schools and districts take a new, strategic approach to designing schedules in order to address learning loss and provide opportunities to re-engage students after multiple years of disrupted learning.
What to Do Now to Make Next Year’s Schedule More Strategic
A strategic schedule amplifies a school’s strategic priorities, encourages teaching and learning best practices, heightens student engagement, and ensures equitable opportunities—all in a cost-effective manner. Here are four practices to consider now to move towards a more strategic schedule and improve outcomes for students.
1. Ensure Priorities Drive the Schedule
Six-period or seven-period schedule? Block schedule or trimester schedule? There is no shortage of schedule options from which school and district leaders may choose. So, is there a “best” schedule model?
Existing and extensive research has not identified a correlation between scheduling models and student achievement. Put simply: there is not one best schedule option. Changing the school bell schedule from a seven-period schedule to a block schedule, for example, does not guarantee better student performance, despite many school and district administrators' best hopes. This is the case at every grade level.
If the type of schedule model appears to have a negligible long-term effect on achievement, how should schools go about selecting a schedule model? Schedule structures should ultimately be determined based on student needs and on school and district goals and priorities. Research on schedule implementation and change management best practices suggest that districts must define clear priorities and goals first, and then—and only then—evaluate which schedule model, number of periods, and length of periods is most conducive to achieving their stated goals. In the ongoing wake of the pandemic, it is important to recognize in what ways goals and priorities have shifted and let that drive your schedule for the coming year.
2. Incorporate Extra Time for Learning Within the School Day
Even before the pandemic, research made clear that students with significant or persistent learning challenges need and benefit from multiple opportunities to learn new content and practice new skills. Regular class time is simply not enough for many students to master the skills and content necessary to be successful. This is especially true for knowledge and skills in subjects like math, reading, and writing, which are vital building blocks for most all other courses.
The answer to more effectively addressing many students’ academic needs is to incorporate regular extra-time learning opportunities into school schedules in the form of intervention blocks or content-specific intervention courses.
At many elementary schools, extra-time opportunities can take the form of either an intervention and enrichment block and/or an extended learning block for specific subjects like math or reading. For example, an elementary school might consider extending its 60-minute math block to 90-minutes to allow for 60-minutes of whole group instruction and an additional 30-minutes of intervention time for small group instruction.
At the secondary level, extra-time supports should include either content-specific intervention coursework, such as a math foundations course that is built into a student’s schedule in addition to grade-level core instruction, and/or the creation of a highly structured “flex” block period in which students can receive targeted academic support or access to an elective.
During extra-time intervention, a content-strong teacher should provide students with just-in-time academic supports based on identified needs that help address misconceptions or challenges with both current year and prior year content. Instruction provided during extra-time intervention should be direct instruction and targeted to a student’s specific skill needs and misunderstandings.
A common misconception is that co-teaching or push-in support is an “equal” alternative to extra-time intervention. This is not true. Co-teaching or push-in support during core instruction is not a substitute for extra-time intervention from content-strong staff, as neither option provides students with actual extra time to master content from prior years nor teachers with the time they need to address student skill gaps.
With the widespread learning loss students have experienced as a result of the pandemic, extra time intervention is more necessary than ever.
3. Offer Voice and Choice to Students to Build Engagement
After many months of disrupted learning, the role and importance of student engagement to learning and achievement has only grown. While many individual educators are finding new and creative ways to connect with, motivate, and engage their students, schools can also take more systemic steps to improve student engagement. One such way is through offering students more voice and choice in the schedule.
Research consistently highlights the fact that the increasing the amount of voice and choice students of all ages have over their education is associated with higher motivation and engagement. In the context of the school schedule, offering student choice means providing students the ability to choose from a set of course options. Offering student voice, by comparison, is giving students the ability to help inform and decide what the course options are to begin with.
Enhancement of student agency has been linked to a variety of important educational outcomes, including elevated achievement levels in marginalized student populations, greater classroom participation and engagement, and decreases in behavioral problems. Research has also shown that increasing student voice is particularly important for historically marginalized populations, including students from Latinx, Black, Native American, and low-income communities as well as students with disabilities.
So, is offering voice and choice to students as part of the scheduling process a “cure all”? Not quite, but a strategic approach to implementation can enhance its impact:
Offering voice and choice should be seen as an arrow in the quiver that is engagement efforts and be done as part of broader efforts to build school culture and student engagement in their academic experience—not as one-off intervention to address academic performance.
Schools and districts must establish a clear theory of action about how and why to provide voice and choice. Document to what degree students will receive voice and choice at different grade levels and share rationale so students and staff understand the reasoning behind the decision.
Students should not be allowed to opt out of key academic activities, such as academic intervention, because they would prefer not to engage in the activities. Voice and choice should not prevent students from receiving foundational academic opportunities and supports.
4. Create Equitable Access to Rigorous Courses
There has been much reported on the fact that the pandemic set back learning for all students, especially for students of color. Even before the pandemic, however, many schedules limited access to engaging and rigorous learning opportunities for many students. Coming out of the pandemic, schools have an opportunity to carefully evaluate their schedules and ensure equitable access to courses of all levels exists.
A schedule is the primary driver of how the core resources of a school—time, staff, space—are allocated and managed. It dictates foundational elements of the student experience, such as the teachers and classmates with whom they interact; the size, composition, and timing of their classes; their access to academic supports; and whether they have access rigorous and engaging courses.
However, building a schedule is a complex task, and in my work supporting schools across the country in designing and building strategic schedules, I often see schedulers struggle to navigate the logistical challenges of building a schedule while also proactively addressing schedule choices and tradeoffs that create inequitable opportunities for students.
Part of the reason behind this is that many schools see schedules as little more than a technical process of assigning chunks of time—and therefore miss the opportunity to address persistent inequities and variation in access to rigorous coursework among different groups of students. A strategic scheduler knows that the scheduling process can perpetuate and even exacerbate disparities in access to rigorous coursework and effective teachers.
An unfortunately common example in high school is when a school’s enrollment policies disproportionately exclude students of color from advanced coursework like AP classes, sometimes based on prerequisites that have limited relevance on students’ actual likelihood of success. Other common practices related to inequitable access to rigorous coursework include:
Overly strict discipline and behavior requirements
A course grade based to a large percentage on homework, especially for classes that are a prerequisite for advanced courses
Belief that access to honors or AP/IB courses should inherently be limited
Grouping or tracking of students enrolled in honors or AP/IB courses in other classes as well
When treated strategically (instead of just technically), the master schedule can help expand access to opportunities, especially for marginalized students, and mitigate inequities. To achieve this, research notes that schools and districts must regularly assess student access to opportunities and rigor through examining questions such as:
What rigorous coursework is available to students?
What are the barriers to entry for rigorous courses?
Which students actually take rigorous courses?
Which students succeed in rigorous courses?
A Strategic Approach to Scheduling Can Address Learning Loss and Reengage Students for the Coming School Year
As you prepare for SY 2022-23, do not miss the opportunity to design a better schedule that will help address learning loss and reengage students after years of disrupted learning due to the pandemic. A strategic approach that begins with defining goals and priorities to drive your schedule, incorporates extra time for learning into the school day, offers students voice and choice, and creates equitable access to rigorous coursework will position your students and teachers for success in the coming year.