Should Schools Rethink Their Schedules?

Below is a very interesting article on how one school is having success by using an irregular schedule. The teachers work their regular 180 days per year, but they're set up in way that bucks tradition. Click on the link at the end to read the article in its entirety:

N.Y.C. School Built Around Unorthodox Use of Time

By Stephen Sawchuk

New York

Superficially, the Brooklyn Generation School, here in the Flatbush area, looks a lot like the other six small public high schools that share space in this tall building, the former South Shore High School.

What's noticeably different about it, though, is the strength of the relationships among staff members. Teachers can be seen running across the hallways to each other's rooms. They tease each other good-naturedly in staff meetings. Most importantly, said Principal Terri Grey, the tenor of staff conversations is markedly different.

"They aren't about something egregious a student did," Ms. Grey said. "Instead, it's three teachers standing there, talking about how one of their kids really got the lesson today."

Teachers here attribute the collegial atmosphere to the public school's novel way of differentiating teachers' roles and staggering their schedules. At Brooklyn Generation, teachers instruct only three classes a day, get two hours of common planning with colleagues each afternoon, and have a highly reduced student load—as few as 14 students per class. Yet the restructured scheduling costs no more to operate than a traditional schedule.

When the visionary behind this school model, Furman Brown, began devising it more than a decade ago, he did so with an eye to using time in new ways so that both students and teachers had opportunities to learn.

"I could always hear great teaching through the wall, but I couldn't see what was happening," Mr. Brown said, recalling his experience as one of the first Teach For America corps members in Los Angeles. "There are a lot of great teachers in inner-city schools, but they don't have the opportunity to learn from each other."

Building Supports

Opened in 2007, Brooklyn Generation now serves about 230 students in grades 9-11, most of whom are black and qualify for federal school-nutrition programs. The school will add a 12th grade next fall and expand to the middle grades over the course of the next few years.

The school's schedule is both dynamic and flexible. Each morning, one group of educators teaches foundations courses in mathematics and the humanities. In the afternoons, those same teachers take on one studio course—science, the arts, and electives. They are also given daily breaks at the same time as their "instructional team" —colleagues in the same grade and content area—allowing them two hours of common planning time.

Twice a year, these dual-role teachers receive a monthlong reprieve consisting of three weeks of vacation followed by a week of professional development with their instructional teams. A second coterie of educators steps in to teach monthlong "intensives," focused on aspects of college and career readiness, from internships through the college-entrance process and financial-aid applications.

Class sizes for the foundations and intensive courses are small—around 15 students—and expand to about 25 for studio classes. The staggered schedules mean that students receive 20 additional instructional days, but no teacher actually works longer than the 180 days set in the New York City teachers' contract.