What Schools Can Learn About Scheduling from the NFL
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What Schools Can Learn About Scheduling from the NFL
It is September, which means a new school year and a new National Football League (NFL) season are upon us. To help kick off the NFL season, the New York Times recently published a fascinating article about how the league creates its TV schedule. As I read the article, however, I could not help but think that I was reading an article about K-12 school scheduling (which, for one thing, is a clear sign I spend too much time thinking about scheduling).
Here is an example to show you what I mean: below, I pulled a few sentences from the Times article and replaced a few choice words (noted in bold).
Actual NFL: “For more than a century, the league relied on a balance of instinct, common sense and computers in slating games…in the 1970s, Val Pinchbeck, a longtime league executive, manually created the schedule using tags for each team that he hung on a peg board to fill out what was then a 224-game jigsaw puzzle.”
Theoretical School: “For more than a century, the school relied on a balance of instinct, common sense and computers in slating classes…in the 1970s, Val Pinchbeck, a longtime school principal, manually created the schedule using tags for each teacher that he hung on a peg board to fill out what was then a 224-class jigsaw puzzle.”
Not that different, right? Turns out schools and districts are not the only type of organization that has often hung on to old ways of building schedules.
The article goes on to highlight a number of changes to how the league creates its master TV schedule. The article makes it very clear that, despite the differences in objectives (e.g. learning versus profit), there are three powerful takeaways that school and district leaders involved in school scheduling can learn from the NFL for how to schedule more strategically:
1. Schedule Software Is Helpful—But Only If You Have Clear Priorities
Actual NFL: “Abandoning its longtime approach of manually blocking out pro football’s traditional anchor games…it fed to its computers dozens of variables that could affect demand for certain teams in certain time slots, including recent trades of certain players, like Aaron Rodgers, and the preferences of the teams and broadcasters. As soon as the Super Bowl ended in February, the N.F.L. used high-powered computers that produced a quadrillion possible schedule combinations.”
Theoretical School: “Abandoning its longtime approach of manually blocking out the school’s traditional anchor classes…it fed to its computers dozens of variables that could affect demand for certain classes in certain time slots, including how many students require intervention in math, and the course preferences of the students. As soon as the school year ended in June, the school used high-powered computers that produced a quadrillion possible schedule combinations.”
Okay, so maybe “a quadrillion” combinations is a stretch and unnecessary for a school, but the point remains: using scheduling software can help you build far more purposeful and sophisticated schedules. This is especially the case for middle and high schools, where schedules are more complex.
The software is a tool, however—not a magic solution that will create the perfect schedule unguided. Just like the NFL, school and district leaders first need to prioritize what is most important (or less important) in a schedule. Sample priorities might include:
After core classes, intervention classes have the highest level of priority when placing students
CTE classes must run in the morning to facilitate external apprentice programming in the afternoon
Class sizes should be smaller in grade-level core classes than in Advanced Placement (AP)
Many scheduling software programs can then take these prioritized variables into account to help you build a schedule aligned to your goals.
2. Great Schedules Build in Flexibility
Actual NFL: “The league now has the flexibility to reassign games at 4:25 p.m. Eastern, the more watched Sunday afternoon slot, regardless of the broadcaster. The NFL uses software during the season to determine which games to move, or flex, into prime time.”
Theoretical School: “The school now has the flexibility to reassign students to math intervention, the more in-demand academic support, regardless of the grade level. The school uses software during the school year to determine which students to move, or flex, into intervention.”
It is tempting to say the schedule is “done” once the school year starts. After all, every student and teacher have assigned classes and know where to go every period, right? This may technically be true, but leaves out the fact that student needs are constantly in flux. Once created, a schedule should not remain static.
One of the best ways to build flexibility into your schedule, especially to meet changing student needs, is by incorporating options for academic intervention. Many of the schools I see do this most successfully create content-specific intervention courses to which students can be assigned based on need, and that run for 6-8 week cycles through the school year. If a student needs support in math, for example, they can, temporarily, be pulled out of an elective class and placed into a math-specific intervention course for an intervention cycle. If they demonstrate improvement by the end of the cycle, they return to their elective.
While some schools accomplish this through deft use of a flex block and mix student assignments on a daily or weekly basis, this is much trickier to pull off and is usually more effort than it is worth.
3. Scheduling More Strategically May Ruffle Feathers—But Will Ultimately Lead to Better Schedules
Actual NFL: “With intriguing matchups more in demand than ever, computer modeling leaves less room for network executives to lobby NFL officials for specific games…While [network executives] rue the new, more data-driven approach, they recognize how hard it is to create a schedule that evenly distributes the most sought-after matchups...”
Theoretical School: “With intriguing classes more in demand than ever, computer modeling leaves less room for teachers to lobby principals for specific periods of the day…While teachers rue the new, more data-driven approach, they recognize how hard it is to create a schedule that evenly distributes the most sought-after classes...”
Even from a purely technical perspective, building effective school schedules is challenging; it is often not easy to make all the blocks of time and unique classes in a schedule fit neatly like in Tetris. Layer in the fact that school principals are organizing how individual teachers and students, all with their own personalities and preferences, spend their day, and scheduling quickly becomes a much more complex exercise in managing hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
Taking individual teacher preferences or historical precedent into account can be fine, but with limits. Remember the first point: priorities should drive your schedule. The fact that Mr. Meyer may prefer not to teach directly after lunch, for example, can be a variable a scheduler considers as they create the schedule—though it should be a very low-ranked priority, especially relative to more student-centric goals.
Take these lessons to heart and you, too, might be saying what one broadcast executive shared in the Times article, “Our schedule this year is better than it’s ever been.”
David James is a former teacher and school leader who serves as an advisor to more than 40 school districts across 15 states. He is co-author of the It's Time for Strategic Scheduling: How to Design Smarter K-12 Schedules That Are Great for Students, Staff, and the Budget, now available on Amazon. He also leads the Secondary Scheduling Academy, an accelerated hands-on training program for school and district leadership teams to enhance capacity for strategic scheduling, build buy-in for changes, and design effective, best practice-aligned schedules that are better for students, teachers, and the budget.