Efforts growing to rethink the way schools use time

Many school leaders are looking for innovative ways to find more time for teacher collaboration and implement models, such as personalized learning. But they often don’t consider redesigning school schedules to allow for more flexibility during the school day, The Hechinger Report notes. Furman Brown, CEO and co-founder of Tegy, a school scheduling design consultancy, stresses the need for schools to rethink traditional ideas about class length, the number of class periods in a day, and the time set aside for lunch. Some of these ideas include varying class lengths and time depending on the content, building in time for teacher collaboration, and employing team-teaching techniques that can reduce student-to-teacher ratios without increasing staff size. The Unlocking Time Project, which is operated by Abl, an education software company, and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, also offers access to free resources that can help schools examine school scheduling options, along with 17 different strategies schools are currently using. The organization is also researching approaches to school scheduling to open up a larger conversation about how time is spent at school.