I realized it has been a while since I have provided an update on the master schedule to the community and it has also been a while since I have updated my blog. Actually, both slips have been due to the same reason, our work with the master schedule. (Affectionately referred to as a our Sudoku puzzle!)
This year it is taking us longer to create our master schedule, and that is due to a variety of reasons, however, all of the reasons have to do with creating a schedule that best supports students and their learning. We have really focused on creating a master schedule that works for our students, not just making the master schedule work. In this we are looking at what courses our students need, the priorities set by the staff, and our goal of creating professional learning communities (PLC) to benefit our students.
In this post I will provide you with an update on what we are doing with our master schedule, why we are doing what we are doing with our master schedule and how we are progressing in getting the master schedule to where we want it to be.
Our Flexible Schedule-
As we have shared on other occasions, for the 2012 - 2013 school year we are working with a new scheduling format. After almost two years of discussions, research, and collaboration Redland Middle School has decided, if possible, to implement what is called the 14-period schedule or a flexible schedule. In this format you look at the schedule as an A day and a B day where some classes meet one period every day (A AND B days) and other classes meet for two periods every other day (A day OR B day). Through our work with staff, students, and parents, we have decided that mathematics, social studies, world languages and reading would meet every day for one period while English, science, fine and performing arts, as well as physical education and health would meet every other day for two periods.
These decisions were made for a variety of reasons. Initially we started exploring a different schedule with members of our staff who were interested in block scheduling. These staff members felt that the block periods allowed for more effective teaching and increased student mastery in their content areas. Our staff was split 50-50 on going to block, but many of the staff members who were against the block schedule wanted to study and explore different models of scheduling to better meet the needs of our students. In looking at different models we found this flexible model and began to explore it. Through this flexible model, we as a community could look at which courses would benefit from a block schedule (two periods every other day) and just implement those classes in the block format while the other classes met each day. An additional feature of this schedule was in providing opportunities for students who have intervention courses (such as math and reading) or specialized support classes (such as resource) the opportunity to enroll in electives as well. In the past if you had an intervention class or you had a class like resource you would take that in place of an arts class or a language, thus causing these students to not be able to ever choose courses they want or explore areas of interest. We identified this as one issue with getting students engaged with learning, if students do not have a say in what they take, and they are not able to take something they would enjoy to explore how could they engage with and enjoy learning? With this schedule our intervention courses and our arts electives are double period courses that occur every other day. Through our scheduling process we have built the schedule so that students who want, and are able to, could do one period of intervention and one period of their arts choice every other day. Again, the goal would be to engage all students and provide students the opportunity to explore areas of interest. EXCITING STUFF!!!
It's a team thing!
This year's scheduling motto (bet you never thought of a scheduling motto) is "It's a Team Thing".
When we worked with staff this year on identifying our top scheduling priorities for next year we overwhelmingly believed that having more inclusive and effective interdisciplinary teams had to be our top priority. If we wanted to most impact students we had to build the team for teachers to collaborate on how to make that happen!
When I started at Redland Middle School (2003 - 2004) we had two pure teams at each grade level, and with an enrollment of 944 students and 67.2 full time equivalent staff members this worked extremely well and most teachers taught one grade level and only kids on their team. Since that time the enrollment at Redland has been dropping steadily to 534 this year (next year we are projected to have about 525 students) and our professional staffing levels have dropped to 46.8 full time equivalent staff members for this current year.
The decrease in enrollment and thus staffing has made it harder each year to create pure teams, so a few years back we went to grade level super teams (one team for each grade level). However, even in moving to super teams, those teams have gotten smaller each year. In reflecting on this over the past year we felt that there were a couple of reasons for this. Obviously there was the staffing, but small schools can make teams happen, so this is not an excuse. There is the number of offerings and single courses we have, but again, this is a need of our students and other schools can make this happen, we can to! We also explored the fact that over the past two years we have tried to create not only teams, but we have tried to create time for our math and English departments to each have department time during the school day, again, not the cause, but when you combine all of the reflections and shake it up, what you end up with is that we have not had one, clear focus and priority for our schedule. This year we talked with our staff, looked at our needs, and we have our focus. It is a team thing!
The power of interdisciplinary teams is vast and the work they do with their own professional growth on how to support kids is vital for our students' success, however it only works if we have teams large enough to facilitate these discussions and this work. After exploring our options our staff has determined that the development of our teams is our top priority. While we have already spent much more time working to create our master schedule for next year than we have in the past, it is paying off. We (with almost 2 out of 3 grades scheduled) have created much larger and more interdisciplinary teams than we have had in a while. I will keep you updated as we progress.
It's not just a team thing, it is a PLC thing.......
One of the focal points that we have as a school for the upcoming year is the development of true and high performing professional learning communities (PLC). A PLC is defined as "an adult collaborative learning environment where we have a common focus and are using data". A we enter next school year we will be working to turn our interdisciplinary teams into PLCs. These PLCs will be working collaboratively towards meeting our focus of teaching every student every day. We will be working with our teams to facilitate a climate where they are continuously using data (formative assessments, peer observations, observation feedback, walk throughs, behavioral data, and a variety of other data points) to work to better meet the needs of our students.
To that end we have made this a top priority of our scheduling and we are building opportunities for all staff to be members of high performing PLCs. This is shifting the way we think about creating our schedule and scheduling students. It has also shifted the way we look at how to utilize and schedule staff as well as looking at how we can change our practices of the past to meet the needs of our current students! This is an exciting shift in our belief and action that, after almost two months of work, we are starting to see happen, and it is AWESOME!!!!
Where do we stand?
As I said, I wanted to provide an update on what we are doing, why we are doing it and how we are progressing. All that is left is the update on where we stand and as I have mentioned throughout this post, this year we have been spending much more time on our schedule than we have in the past, and I know that the benefits of this work will be significant for our students, so we are continuing to move forward. We started our scheduling work in very early March with our projection of staffing and class needs following by our allocation of staffing on March 6th. We spent about a month working on the schedule and at a checkpoint (April 10th) we did not like what we were seeing. After working with some colleagues on April 13th we decided to scrap the work we were doing and start over. The initial schedule we created was not working for kids, was not creating the teams we wanted, so we "cleared the board" and started over. Going into a new type of schedule (the flexible schedule) we knew it would be a challenge, and rather than make the schedule work, we want the schedule to work FOR KIDS, so on April 13th we started fresh.
Starting fresh was a great idea, and not only did we start fresh but we refreshed our focus an goals (a schedule that worked for kids and created meaningful PLCs). We started with our 6th grade and spent the better part of most days over the course of the past week working just on 6th grade. However, by the start of the day yesterday (April 23) we had all but 4 6th graders completely scheduled with our schedule and we had created a fantastic and inclusive 6th grade PLC!!! So, we began the work on 7th grade yesterday, arts, and physical education courses. Again, we have taken the time to place classes so that we can meet the needs of our students, while creating an effective PLC for the 7th grade, the arts, and the physical education department. Actually, at the time that we left all three of these groups had THE SAME TIME OFF!!! However, after 1 day's work we have about 65 - 70% of our 7th graders scheduled. (Not too bad considering it took us 3-4 days to get to this point with 6th grade) Our goal is to have the 7th grade done by Thursday and move on to 8th grade Friday. We have made some great progress (when we scrapped the schedule on the 13th and started over, we were having difficulties getting over 40% of the students scheduled!) but we still have quite a bit of work to do.
In summary, this is an exciting time for Redland. Our work on the master schedule is setting the stage for an amazing year next year for staff and students. I will keep you up to date as we progress.
