It’s Time for Strategic Scheduling: How to Design Smarter K–12 Schedules That Are Great for Students, Staff, and the Budget

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program today Nate Levinson and David James. Nathan Levinson has served as a school board member, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction in Harvard, Massachusetts, and superintendent of Arlington, Massachusetts Public Schools. And he currently serves as president of New Solutions K-12. David James is Managing Director at New Solutions K-12 and a former public middle school teacher. He facilitates New Solutions K-12 Scheduling Academy, and they are the co-authors together of It's Time for Strategic Scheduling, how to design smarter K-12 schedules that are great for students, staff, and the budget.

[00:52] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:55] SPEAKER_02:

Nate and David, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:57] SPEAKER_00:

Great to be here.

[00:58] SPEAKER_02:

Thanks so much. This is a topic that I hear come up all the time among administrators, especially at the secondary level, but really at all levels, elementary, middle, and high school, and with special sympathy to those who run K-8 or K-12 schools that have all of their needs combined under one roof. What did you see going on in the profession and what needs did you see that prompted you to go into your line of work and to put this book together?

[01:21] SPEAKER_00:

I think that we saw two things. So the first that you mentioned is this is a pain for a lot of principals and a lot of school-based folks. Very few people look forward to doing it. And at the end of the day, when they're done, very few say, hey, I love the schedule I just built. So it is hard and not particularly satisfying. And we thought, hey, could we help with that?

[01:42]

But what we learned was most of the reason it is so hard and most of the reason it is not very satisfying is that there hadn't been enough thinking about what mattered most. They were trying to build a technical schedule, getting all the parts and pieces to fit. And that was hard. They actually never will. You're always going to have to make tough trade-offs and without having thought through a lot of what mattered most kind of questions, those trade-offs were really very uncomfortable and very seldom appreciated.

[02:13] SPEAKER_01:

Just to add on to that, a lot of my interest and inclination in writing the book stem from my experiences as a teacher and as a school leader. That when I first started scheduling, I think my experience was very similar to many other school leaders I've since spoken to. And it was essentially, here's the school schedule that we use this year. Why don't you just roll it over to be the school schedule next year, make some tweaks and edits, and then that'll be that. And even that process still takes a lot of time, energy, and effort. But it didn't actually give me the opportunity to think about what should we be scheduling?

[02:46]

What would be best for our students? How can we most efficiently use our staff? Is it actually aligned to known and established best practices out there? And I think for those reasons, I definitely wanted to write a book that could help school leaders and district leaders take a step back and say, all right, if this is the schedule we have, how does it compare to some of these really, really strong practices? And where can we make some changes structurally in a way that actually align to our goals and are feasible and cost-effective?

[03:14] SPEAKER_00:

I think the other part that really brought this to the fore. I think this book would have had a lot of value five years ago, but post pandemic, I mean, our kids went through so much disruptive learning. I know everybody pitched in and tried to do it remotely or hybrid, but those were not equal years. And if you are using the same schedules you had before the pandemic, It just seems really unlikely that those schedules are optimized to make up all the mislearning, to create the ways to engage kids, motivate kids. And so the need to try to do some things differently changed a lot. And it's just fascinating to me that in the post-pandemic world, at least for a few years, we got a lot of extra money, but nobody got an extra minute to really catch kids up and the money's going away, the need's still there.

[04:07]

And so making every minute precious and count just seems to be doubly important today.

[04:14] SPEAKER_01:

We sometimes joke with each other that the two most common frustrations we hear from school and district leaders are we want more time and we want more staff. And when we did a review of books that are already out there about school scheduling and how they can help schools address those two challenges, We saw a lot of them were overly technical, fairly complicated and not a helpful guide to enable folks to kind of walk through step by step. What are the big ideas you should be thinking about for scheduling? And so that's another reason that we put this book together.

[04:46] SPEAKER_02:

I love that you started with the strategic idea, the idea of starting with best practices, with some key priorities, because once you get into the nitty gritty of scheduling, often it feels like just a pile of idiosyncrasies that you have to fit together Tetris blocks, right? Every school has this one person you have to schedule around because they have some weird thing that they have to do. And in my school, this was a wonderful arrangement. We had many job share teachers where one person would do the morning, one person would do the afternoon. We had a non-whole number of specialists teaching PE and art and library. And we ultimately ended up making them all full-time just to free up some time in the schedule.

[05:24]

But I think we've all dealt with those idiosyncrasies in different ways where just every school has these weird things that dictate maybe much more of the schedule than we would like. Are there even any generalizable skills when it comes to scheduling? Because I see a lot of new leaders wanting to develop this skill and then they get into it and it's 100% idiosyncrasies and they think, well, am I ever going to get good at this? Or is this just Tetris forever? What's your take on that kind of question?

[05:54] SPEAKER_00:

Sure. I think two thoughts. So one is principals often feel like their job is to build the best schedule they can with all those constraints you just mentioned. One of the more interesting chapters in our book is on how to have a better process for building a schedule. And a key element of that is what we call teamwork. And there are a couple elements of that team.

[06:18]

The first is a principal central office team. So I just love that example of it's so darn hard because I got this PE teacher who's here in the mornings and Thursday afternoon. And that says mucking everything up. But here's the weird part. The person who assigned them to be there in the mornings and Thursday afternoon had no idea that was mucking everything up. And what if there was a process that figured out when did it make the most sense for them to be there and for all the schools that share a person to build their schedule simultaneously and as a set.

[06:51]

And some of those idiosyncrasies actually get reduced. And I think the other thing that we talk a lot about is the importance of scheduling expertise. There is no reason that a principal or an assistant principal should be the one to build a schedule. They should definitely be the one to set the strategy to help decide what is of most value and to wrestle with trade-offs with the technical skill of building schedules often goes to people who don't necessarily have that skill. And so those idiosyncrasies just become more overwhelming.

[07:28] SPEAKER_01:

I think the other thing that we'll often do with folks when we partner with them is to say, let's sit down. Let's not even look at the schedule. Let's not even get into the scheduling software or anything like that. And let's just come up with a list of what are the most important things for your school as you think about the schedule. always encourage folks to come up with a prioritized list of priorities and so that'll look like a list of things that are must-haves and then a second list of things that are nice to haves and in that initial list of the must-haves rank order number one number two number three and so you might say Providing academic intervention literacy is the most important thing. And so that's going to be number one, ensuring students have ample time on core instruction, at least 15 minutes a day, that's going to be number two.

[08:11]

And on down the list, if you have a very clear documented list like that, it's easier to translate and to communicate to others why your schedule is the way that it is. And it helps you navigate some of those, as you were saying, Justin, inevitable trade-offs or idiosyncrasies or quirks of your schedule. Because if you say we're going to be sharing FTE, That's in some ways a de facto priority because you're saying we're going to have to run art as an example at this time. So that's something that's really important because we share that stuff with another building. So I think as a school leader, if you can document those priorities, that really helps navigate those challenges as you get deeper into the weeds.

[08:49] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I wanted to ask about intervention and special education in particular, because one of our perpetual scheduling challenges was resource room support. And if whether a school is doing push-in support or pull-out, or there are lots of different models for support, lots of different models for intervention. It tends to be at the elementary level that everybody wants their kids to go to resource at the same time. Everybody wants the push-in support at the same time, and you have a limited number of human beings to actually provide those services and supports. So what's some of your thinking around intervention and support services where we have just not enough time in the day for everybody to have their first choice of when they want those things to happen?

[09:29] SPEAKER_00:

I'll take the elementary, and David, maybe you can jump in and share about the secondary. So again, this... As David shared, why it is so important to have a list of priorities that are in order. So imagine I had a list of priorities that said, I want every student who needs intervention to get it.

[09:47]

And I said, I wanted every student with an IEP to get all the services they're supposed to have. And then maybe I even said, I want to make sure all those IEP services actually help them learn and achieve. I suspect if I had those three on a list. and I added to the list, Mary would like to do reading before 9.30. It probably would not replace every kid getting intervention.

[10:14]

But if you don't actually have that list, Mary was asked, I'm not blaming her, first grade teacher said, hey, you asked me for my opinion. I hate that you've got me teaching reading at 11.30. And then the scheduler says, okay, I'll move you to 930. And lo and behold, you don't have enough reading teachers or special educators. What we know is that if you're going to do intervention and special education services well, efficiently, and really help the strongest teachers support the most kids, you have to stagger when intervention is.

[10:50]

You want to group it at a grade level, meaning let's have four first grades do intervention at nine o'clock and four second grades do it at nine 30 and throughout the day. And what happens is one, the interventionist can group kids across multiple grade level, across multiple classrooms who have the exact same need. They can pull a group of five kids who are struggling and findings who might be in four different classrooms. That reading teacher would be available to help for all the first graders in the morning. And all the second graders after that, all the third graders after that, so would the special ed teachers. So your wind block or your intervention block has classroom teachers plus a whole lot of other folks.

[11:35]

The other nice thing that happened is, hey, if I'm a speech therapist, I know when to pull and when not to pull a student from class. Like I should not pull them during reading and math. But if everybody taught reading and math at the same time, I have to pull half my kids then. And so two things happen. So one is what I'll call the technical solution. I just outlined for you a technical solution to scheduling intervention and special ed services.

[12:05]

But the adaptive part that we talked about in the book is getting teachers to understand why somebody had to teach, you know, reading at 1130 or 1230. And when teachers actually realize that, oh, if I didn't do that, then kids are leaving my classroom during reading to get speech therapy. They will normally push back because they didn't see what I call the implications of their request. And so the book is as much about the change management process related to scheduling. It's funny. Everybody seems to hate their schedule until you try to change it.

[12:43] SPEAKER_01:

I think at the secondary level, One of the most common practices that we see at the middle school level and at the high school level, there's usually more something like a flex block. Time and again, when we've worked with folks and from what a lot of educators and school leaders have told us, it's particularly challenging time to organize and to structure and to use well. A lot of what we share in the book is that research is very clear that for students that need additional academic support, targeted direct instruction via extra time intervention is always going to give you your biggest bang for the buck. And so instead of something like a more general catch-all flex block where maybe you have kind of an all hands on deck and the math teacher is available and the LA teacher is available and the art teacher is available and everyone's helping students with math, but they may or may not bring that actual content expertise. Better to replace that with something where you have content-specific classes taught by a math teacher or math interventionist.

[13:38]

Maybe class sizes are a little bit larger for those, but you can ensure that students are getting really rigorous and effective support. You make sure that those are, in fact, classes that they're they have a course code. They're built into the teacher schedule or schedule or rather they're built into student schedules. We've seen that as well as issuing grades or pass fail for students credit. If it's at the high school level, just add so much more weight and purpose to that time, both for students and for teachers. that it results in better outcomes for students and just a more effective use of time more generally when it's something that's an actual course built in the schedule as opposed to this flex time.

[14:19]

Maybe you walk down the hall and get homework and help, or maybe you retake a quiz, but it's not actually true intervention. And so at the secondary level, that's usually what we'll look for.

[14:30] SPEAKER_00:

It's fascinating to me that in so many middle and high schools, Everybody says they want and need a longer day. And it would certainly make life easier if the day was longer. There's so much we want to do with kids. But the flip side is when we ask teachers and principals, is every minute of the day really making a world of difference for kids? And an example David gave, a lot of folks will say that flex block, it's a really nice idea. but it's not really helping very much.

[14:59]

And so this idea of repurposing the time you already have and to make it more impactful is just a key part of strategic scheduling.

[15:09] SPEAKER_02:

One thing I'm seeing a lot of schools move to and away from that more flexible block is, say, a reading class paired with a reading lab and a math class paired with a math lab, or maybe they do one and not the other. But as you said, a specific period, an actual course with a course code and some sort of accountability for who is actually where during that time. What are some other kind of common structures that are making it easier for schools to kind of get what they want out of their schedule that maybe traditionally we didn't pay as much attention to?

[15:39] SPEAKER_01:

I think one thing that comes to mind is this idea that sometimes less is more. I know we just spoke about how the flex block can be a tricky time to organize. I put advisory, especially at the middle school level or the high school level in a similar bucket where it's not uncommon for schedules that we've seen where you have advisory daily for 15 or 20 minutes and adding that up over the course of the year, that's a fairly significant amount of time. And maybe that advisory is positioned for teachers to say, hey, this is time that you can build relationships with 10, 15 students or so. You get to decide what the activities are and how you want to spend that time and really own that time as a teacher. When we talked with the teachers, however, many will share, gosh, like I don't receive a lot of guidance for this and it'd be great to have more structure and maybe a curriculum of some sort or some activities that I could work off of.

[16:24]

And whereas let's say a school had a need and a priority for improving the relationships of students and teachers or maybe students to students, they might reasonably say let's block out 20 minutes a day for advisory and give folks time for this to happen, but I think we'll always encourage folks to think carefully about how are you setting your teachers up and your students up to use that time well. And so I think an example we give in the book is that a school that had something similar to that and actually decided we're just gonna do advisory once 45 minutes on Friday, once a week that is, and really invest some time and energy from school leaders and even from a district administrator to help support teachers on using that time. And that time was much better spent than those 20 minutes on a daily basis. And so sometimes by scaling back how much time you have on different activities and narrowing in and really making sure that's super intentional, that can make a big difference we've seen as well.

[17:17] SPEAKER_00:

And I think another related thought is maybe one of the most overlooked strategies for building relationships is what we call voice and choice. As we think about building relationships, almost everybody I've ever been friends with, we have something in common. I happen to like kayaking and antiquing and a crazy proportion of my friends like one or both of those things. But in the classic advisory, all the kids who's Last name starts with a goes to Mr James and you all are going to become friends and you're going to confide in them and they're going to care about you and that is not actually how most people build relationships and I think. it is not uncommon for the kid who plays the flute to tell you at the age of 50, how much the band teacher meant to them.

[18:10]

And for the six year old to talk about how the track coach, which meant they ran track, meant to them that having shared interests is a critical component and pathway to building meaningful relationships. So having Where teachers share their interests and kids get to say, Hey, I am really interested in baking and you like the great British bake-off. So we're going to have an advisory slash club period during the day. We're getting together. And what I know for sure is we got at least one thing in common. And I think it was people have tried to get kids engaged in school, having electives in the middle school, which many middle schools seem to resist, but Ask a kid what they want to learn and let them learn it.

[18:59]

And that gives them a great motivation to come to school. So voice and choice seems underutilized as a strategy for engagement and relationship building.

[19:09] SPEAKER_01:

I think the other thing that comes to mind, Justin, to your question is a fairly quick calculation that schools can run. It's something we'll call use of time analysis. But if you sit down, you look at a typical student's schedule, you map out how many minutes in a typical day do they spend on core instruction like math, science, ELA, etc., call it non-core instruction, enrichment, electives, specials, et cetera, on non-instructional time like lunch or transitions, on intervention activities, whether it's a flex block or an intervention class, and on relationship building time or structured relationship building time. And if you look at those five categories and map out how many minutes do we have allocated for a typical student's day in those five categories, translate those to percentages as a percentage of the total school day, that gives you a pretty good idea of where your minutes are being devoted. And I think a good benchmark that can be helpful for folks, if you're at a secondary school, like a middle school or high school, typically at least 50% of the day should be devoted to core instruction.

[20:07]

If you're at elementary school, about 60% of the day. If you have percentages that are really high on 15, 20% of the day on non-instructional time, that can be a place to look as well. Are our transitions too long? Are we devoting too much time to lunch in an unproductive way? And so even that quick set of numbers can help guide some helpful conversations.

[20:26] SPEAKER_02:

One thing that I wanted to make sure to ask about David and Nate is the idea of complexity. That often our schedules start to get complicated because we add complexity in order to resolve specific problems. Those idiosyncrasies of this person's available at that time and otherwise they're not on campus or we have this issue going on. So we add some complexity. And at the elementary level, that can look like floating prep periods that move from day to day. And every day of the week is a different schedule for a given class.

[20:53]

At the secondary level, it can look like different bell schedules, which of our nine bell schedules are we using today? And it can get kind of overwhelming. What's your take on complexity versus kind of stripping things back to the most simple and then like only doing things if we really need to. And then a second part of the question, do you have any expectation that artificial intelligence will help us with any of this?

[21:17] SPEAKER_00:

So I think I have a question of complexity. My unsatisfying answer is that schedules should be as complex as they need to be and no more. What I mean by that is if your priorities, highly efficient staffing, lots of time on core, voice and choice, shared staff, require the schedule to be complex, then let it be complex because kids actually roll with these just fine. Adults and parents think it's too hard, but all the kids I've interviewed, yeah, it takes them 48 hours to figure it out. But I will say that a lot of the complexity isn't there because it needed to be. It was there because people hadn't made tough decisions about priorities.

[22:03]

They didn't have the technical expertise to build a schedule that was less complex. If it's complex because we didn't have the skills or didn't have the necessary conversations, then don't do that. But if it's in pursuit of what mattered most, I don't want to sleep over it because the kids don't want to sleep over it.

[22:25] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And as an example, we'd worked with one very large high school in Connecticut and we sat down with the principal and they had a One of the more complex schedules that we'd worked with was a rotating schedule that was also a waterfall. So there's drop periods and there is, I think, a seven day cycle. And so it did not pass what we call the wake up test where students and teachers alike had to consult. What is it? What day is it?

[22:49]

What classes do I have? What classes am I not taking, etc. ? And the principal made the point of sometimes teachers get frustrated with it and families and parents do, but I've never heard a student complain, gosh, like I can't, I don't get this schedule. And I think we'd have to go ask all the students whether that is in fact the case, but I think adults tend to overestimate schedule complexity and how much that impacts students. I think they can handle it more regularly and more easily than adults often can.

[23:17]

And I think to your second point around AI and the future of scheduling, part of me says scheduling still is a ways to go for some baseline foundational practices to really engage with what I understand to be some of these new opportunities with AI. that a lot of the scheduling tools that are out there, whether they're built into SIS systems or not, aren't always the most user-friendly, aren't always the easiest to use, aren't always created in a way that makes it quick to create different options and visualize things. And so we're seeing some interesting new programs and softwares and companies get created around that. I think there's more momentum in the world of scheduling at this point to say, let's create some easier tools that lay out just the most important information and help folks iterate and create different options for schedules and see the implications on their staffing on time for students in a way that existing tools make it harder to do.

[24:11]

And you have to do a fair amount of legwork and background to say, all right, well, if you have this many teachers. And this many students, let's calculate the average class size and go about it that way. And so I think once scheduling upgrades itself to that level, then I think there'll be more opportunity to say, wow, how can we, better predict what students will want or need. I will say a more kind of manual way to get ahead of some of that is some schools will ask students, in this case at high school, ask students during their ninth grade year, what classes do you want to take through high school? And so they have at least a four-year projection on where students or what courses students want to take. Does that change over time?

[24:53]

For sure, but at least gives them more guidance than they would have otherwise for each of the students and give some more information to the guidance counselors or others to navigate some of those scheduling conversations with students. Definitely excited to see where things go in the next couple of years.

[25:06] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that'll be interesting because I feel like the more narrow the question, the more potential there is for technology to make it easier. But if we're struggling to even answer our basic questions about what do we care about? What are our priorities? I think you do a great job of addressing those in the book. And those will always be the questions that we still have to ask ourselves and answer for ourselves, even if we have new technology that makes the actual assigning of classes to periods and students to classes more automated. Those tools will continue to evolve.

[25:37]

So I wonder if you could tell us just to wrap things up a little bit about the work that you do at your organization at New Solutions K-12 to help build this capacity in schools and districts.

[25:48] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we'll partner with folks in a couple of different ways. Sometimes we'll provide really specific technical support and help people get into software, like a power scheduler or get into Excel and create schedules. More often though than not, the work that we'll do is to help folks, like I mentioned before, take a step back and say, all right, let's look at your current schedule. In what ways does it currently work well for students and for teachers and staff and use your resources well? Where are their pain points or frustrations? And what are those priorities that you want to guide your scheduling and staffing decisions going forward?

[26:21]

And come up with kind of a tailored and focused game plan for what to focus your schedules on and have that prioritized list going forward. Sometimes that means there literally is just a list of these are priorities and this is what we want to do. Sometimes that's an updated set of scheduling guidance. And that could be something by saying, all right, in the sixth grade, we're going to do 50 minutes to math and 50 minutes to science. And in the seventh grade, it's going to be double that or whatever combination it is. But I think if you can get that list and if you can get specific minutes by grade level allocated to different subjects, that gives you just a lot of objective information to have more objective conversations, I think, with teachers and staff and to share the rationale around scheduling decisions.

[27:02]

We've been working with one district in Massachusetts that had the shortest elementary school day of any district in the state. And so they had some very challenging decisions. situations and conversations to be had because they said, gosh, we only have six hours and we want to do all this stuff. How are we going to make it happen? And so we'll help facilitate and navigate some of those more challenging conversations that ultimately have to be had if you really want a better strategic schedule for students. And that's a lot of what we focus on in our scheduling practice.

[27:29]

We do some work around special education and strategic budgeting as well. But yeah, that's most of it on the scheduling side.

[27:34] SPEAKER_02:

And your website is newsolutionsk12.com. Is that right? That's it. So the book is It's Time for Strategic Scheduling, How to Design Smarter K-12 Schedules That Are Great for Students, Staff, and the Budget. Nathan Levinson and David James, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[27:50]

It's been a pleasure.

[27:51] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for hosting us. I appreciate it.

[27:53] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.