Upper School Schedule Adjusted
Education consultants sometimes say a school is only as good as the schedule on which it runs. Several years ago, Colorado Academy made the big plunge schoolwide to a six-day rotating schedule. While there were a few implementation bumps, as would be expected, generally speaking the school administrative team has been happy with the “A-F” rotating days for what that schedule allows us to do in creating the best possible educational environment for our students preK-12.
Now that we have lived with that particular daily schedule for four years in the Upper School, we have noticed a few aspects we would like to change; therefore we are planning to make adjustments next year to address those issues. The primary reason for making these alterations is to increase our level of scheduling flexibility. As it stands now, we can achieve greater than a 90% success rate in terms of scheduling students in the classes they register for, as we work to avoid conflicts and slot everything into reasonable sections. But that task has gotten increasingly difficult as we have diversified our course catalog in the name of greater innovation and student options; we now have more “singletons” (single-section courses) than we used to. Consequently, we also have more scheduling conflicts than we used to. Our new schedule attends to that challenge by eliminating two more fixed blocks (4 and 7 in our old schedule) that had become impediments to scheduling flexibility.
Another matter we wanted to address has to do with early dismissals for athletic contests. Our school day goes much later (3:30) than most of the other schools with whom we compete, not to mention that we are also working against constraints in how much daylight we have in the fall and spring. So our athletes often must leave school by around 2:45 to get to away games, or sometimes even for a home game. That means they are usually missing all or part of their last block class, and then subsequently needing to make up the work or meet with a teacher. In the illustration linked below, it is evident that we have pushed several non-class components to the end of our day. Advisory and club meeting time, along with teacher help time, are critical to our program, but easier for a student to miss without academic ramifications.
Other smaller matters were lower in priority, but once we opened this discussion, we also wanted to see if we could “tweak” those things and create more symmetry and predictability in the rotation as well.
In summary, the key advantages to the newly revised daily schedule are:
- Greater scheduling flexibility for our registrar, which in turn allows for a greater success rate of getting students into the courses they sign up for, including more single-section courses, with fewer conflicts.
- All teaching blocks are now equal with every class period being exactly 65 minutes long. All seven periods meet four out of six days in the rotation for a total of 260 minutes per cycle.
- More time allotted for club meetings and special programming; better placement in the day for Town Hall.
- Mitigation of the impact of early dismissals, which usually occur around 2:45 or later. Instead of interrupting class time, these dismissals will occur during the “softer” part of the schedule (advisory, club, teacher help time).
- From the student standpoint: one extra day to sleep a little later!
- Less homework overall as we have eliminated the two teaching blocks that used to meet five out of six days (for which homework could therefore be assigned five out of six days).
- More opportunity for field trips in the local area, as teachers could take advantage of the schedule in a way that would give them about 3 hours with their class without creating a major disruption to other scheduled classes.
- Better overall rotation of the seven blocks so that all class periods are spread out fairly through the cycle.
Some potential issues we will watch for:
- On some days, some students will have four academic courses in a row with only a short break in the morning. That makes for a busy day. (But generally a day like this is offset somewhere else in the rotation by a much lighter day. Also, more often than not, one of the four classes will be an arts class.)
- Student-athletes will miss the scheduled help time and club times more often than others.
- Juniors and seniors who have off-campus privileges may well feel that their “day is done” after lunch if the only class block left for them is an “off-block” (no class scheduled). We will need to monitor coming and going more carefully and determine whether we feel a student is leaving more often than he/she should. On the other hand, parents can always call to dismiss a student in the afternoon and this would be the ideal time to schedule off-campus appointments.
You can click here for a side-by-side view of this year’s schedule and next year’s
http://bit.ly/1AZmFwC. As you can see, the changes are not earth-shattering, but they do help us accomplish the goals I itemized above.
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