Tips for Building Strategic Secondary Schedules

Emanating from our framework and based on our experience working with hundreds of schools across the country as well as our extensive research, District Management Group has developed a methodology and a series of tactics to help design schedules to achieve your district’s goals. While we cannot communicate our methodology and all our tactics in this short article, we provide here an overview of seven key tips to help design and build strategic, results-driven secondary schedules. We invite you to contact us to hear about our approach in more detail and learn how to create secondary schedules that help you meet your strategic objectives.

1. Approach scheduling as a team sport

Secondary schedules involve every person in the building. In fact, few features of schools are as personal and contentious as the building schedule. Before embarking on any scheduling redesign work, we believe it is essential for the school or district to assemble a scheduling team composed of key stakeholders (usually six to eight people, often including administrators, schedulers, counselors, and teachers) from across the building or district. Essential voices must be included in the conversation.

By having key stakeholders and decision makers at the table from the beginning of the process, schools create a collaborative and results-focused approach. Redesigning a schedule requires extensive change management, and creating a scheduling team allows for collaboration from the start and fosters greater understanding as key tradeoffs for important scheduling decisions are weighed.

2. Set clear priorities for your schedule

You can schedule anything, but you can’t schedule everything. Indeed, the biggest misstep schools make is trying to fit everything into the schedule — math intervention, guided reading, world language, music, expansive specials, the list goes on and on. When the schedule tries to do too much, few things are done well. The more things you add in, the more time you take away from what you already have.

Scheduling decisions therefore need to be grounded in clear goals and priorities. We always begin our work by asking members of a scheduling team to write out their priorities. This step is all too often overlooked, perhaps because the priorities are assumed to be well understood, but it almost always reveals multiple, sometimes conflicting priorities.

The scheduling team’s work together must begin with discussing, defining, and then clearly articulating the agreed-upon priorities for their school and schedule. It is also helpful to define the logic model behind identified priorities. What is it about the identified priorities that will bring about change or success in the school? This reasoning gives schedulers the focus and guidance they need to manage the endless tradeoffs that emerge in the process of building a schedule.

With agreed-upon priorities as the north star, the team must then distinguish between “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves” within the schedule. For example, do all teachers need common planning time? How should a student with multiple needs (special education, multilingual, etc.) be scheduled for electives? Prioritizing means that you have to say no to some great things. Collectively deciding on the “must-haves” versus the “nice-to-haves” allows districts and schools to provide coherent guidance for the people tasked with building and managing the schedule.

3. Maximize time on instruction

To create effective schedules, schools must closely examine how much time they spend on instruction compared to how much time is spent on non-instruction. In many schools, past practice has led to exceedingly long passing periods or transition time or misused non-instructional time such as homeroom. You might think a couple of minutes wouldn’t make a big difference. However, repurposing relatively small amounts of time can make a massive difference over the course of the school year. For example, one district decided to repurpose 10 minutes of locker time that was at the beginning of each day and allocate it back to instructional time—specifically, core content time. Over the course of the year, repurposing those 10 minutes of locker time each day added up to an additional 30 hours of instructional time (Exhibit 2).

As you reflect on the length of time dedicated to instruction, you should also consider how the time you allocate for each course or subject corresponds with its curriculum and academic standards. There should be coherence between them: for example, if your math curriculum requires 60-minute blocks for implementation, you should be sure that you are providing students and staff with sufficient time.

The big takeaway here is to know how much time is devoted to core, non-core, and non-instructional time and to ensure that students are provided ample time and opportunity to learn based on the stated approach.

4. Select a schedule model that fits your priorities

Questions we are frequently asked are “What’s the best schedule model? Is it block scheduling? Is it a traditional eight-period schedule? What’s the ‘right’ number of courses for a student to take at one time?”

Many are surprised to learn that research shows there is no single scheduling structure that is the “silver bullet,” and no “right” number of courses for a student to take at one time. Instead, research shows a strong positive relationship between academic learning time and student achievement. The more time a student has to learn for a given subject, the more they will learn. The essential caveat: time must be used effectively. And using time effectively in the schedule requires that all students and staff know why a specific schedule model was selected and how the time was intended to be used.

There is a wide variety of bell schedule models and structures used across middle schools and high schools. In general, three dimensions drive the design of secondary schedules:

1. Number of periods per day
2. Number of days in a cycle
3. Number of terms per year

Choosing a schedule model requires that you consider some inherent tradeoffs. For example, the number of periods in a day and over a cycle drives the total amount of time that students spend on core instruction. Depending on how students access core classes, the more periods that are added to the day lead to fewer total minutes students spend in each class. Alternatively, adding more periods can create more elective opportunities for students.

Period length only impacts student outcomes when teachers use that time effectively. The more time students have to learn, the more they will learn; however, that is assuming that they have an effective teacher and time is used appropriately, so providing adequate training and support to teachers on how to best use the instructional time available is critical.

Another important consideration is that different schedule models can have massive financial or staffing implications depending on how teacher caseloads are structured. The number of periods a teacher can teach in a day according to the teacher contract significantly impacts the efficiency of a schedule.

Switching schedule models can transform outcomes for schools and districts provided that the decision is motivated by thoughtful priorities. Each schedule model comes with implications, pedagogical and financial, and changing the schedule structure can have a domino effect. As you think about potential schedule models, think about their implications. Grounding the design of your schedule in your priorities allows you to determine which schedule type will best meet the needs of your students and district. It also forms the narrative for why the change in schedule is needed.

5. Analyze course enrollment and adjust course offerings to align with student need

Schools of all shapes and sizes deal with the common challenge of which classes to offer. Interesting and rigorous course offerings help to define schools, and they are often deeply personal, tied to the incredible educators who teach them.

In many schools and districts, course offerings are taken as a given, rarely updated or examined. Analyzing course enrollment across course sections can be a great proxy for understanding whether course offerings are suiting the needs of students and if a school’s approach to staffing and scheduling is unintentionally benefiting a small subset of students. While schools and districts regularly calculate average class sizes, these figures may mask more nuanced trends. A more detailed analysis might show that disparities exist in average class sizes between different types of classes (core, elective, advanced, interventions, etc.). In many districts, regular-level core classes often have the largest class sizes, resulting in an unintentional investment in small class sizes for electives and advanced classes (Exhibit 3).

Reviewing courses with low enrollment can help identify courses that may be less popular or less suited to the changing needs of students. With careful scheduling and advanced planning, districts can reduce the number of low-enrollment courses without limiting student choice. Tactics that can be particularly effective include setting minimum class size limits, merging similar courses, and rotating specialized offerings.

Engaging teachers and other stakeholders in discussions about low-enrollment courses prior to building the schedule helps set expectations and avoid conflicts and disappointments. Waiting until significant portions of the schedule are already built and completed before discovering that certain classes must be eliminated can create disappointment for teachers and already-registered students.

6. Build in opportunities for intervention for students who struggle

Research and DMGroup’s experience working with hundreds of school districts suggest that one of the most powerful levers to raise student achievement is to build extra time into the schedule for targeted intervention opportunities. Many elementary schools have executed this strategy successfully in recent years, but secondary schools face unique challenges to integrating extra-time blocks into the schedule due to the greater variety of classes, the complexity of secondary staff schedules, and the different needs of students at that stage of their education. While intervention is difficult to schedule, providing these opportunities for students who struggle is critical.

Secondary schools often provide intervention by squeezing extra help into the same class period while students are receiving core instruction or by adding opportunities outside of the school day. Interventions come in a variety of forms, from co-teaching, push-in, or specialist support to implementing a separate curriculum for struggling learners. More help and more adults are provided, but not more time to learn.

Best-practice research calls for extra time for interventions, not “instead of” time. This means that students who struggle are exposed to a first presentation of the content—100% of their current year materials—during core instruction, which allows them to be fully immersed in the classroom experience, learn from peer questions and interactions, stay socially engaged, and have the benefit of first being exposed to the material from their skilled core-instruction teacher. Then, in an extra period, students receive the interventions and supports they need to fully master the material (Exhibit 4).

Secondary Level Reading Program

At the secondary level, intervention supports most often include English and math, but, in some districts with significant achievement challenges, it is vital to include foundational reading intervention support as well.

Reading skills for struggling readers are distinct from the skills taught in English/ELA, which focus on interpretation, analysis, discussion, and writing. An extra period with an English teacher is not sufficient for struggling readers, who require the specific support of highly skilled and effective teachers of reading. Secondary students who struggle with reading should receive at least 60 minutes of additional time each school day focused specifically on reading, with explicit teaching strategies for comprehension.