Introduction
Our school uses Senior Systems, a popular suite of School Management tools. One of the components is a Scheduling Module which various members of our faculty and staff use to design and implement our daily schedule. Other modules include financial, grading and attendance tools, as well as the enrollment system which feeds students directly into the Scheduling Module. In order to accomplish this Internship Activity, I completed the following steps:
- Met with Mr. H, our Middle and Upper School Principal, during the summer preceding the 2010-2011 school year to discuss:
- the vagaries of our Master Schedule for the 2009-2010 year
- the changes he planned to implement for 2010-2011
- the various ways the options a Master Schedule presents can impact effective teaching and learning
- Met with Mrs. F in the Guidance Department to see the specific tasks required to process enrollment information and create student and teacher schedules using Senior Systems.
- As a former teacher, I have been in semi-constant contact with our Guidance Department for years about the challenges and last-minute changes involved with our Master Schedule.
From these interviews and experiences, I learned quite a bit about how our Master Schedule is constructed and what sort of factors impact any changes which are proposed. I heard about how difficult it can be to construct a schedule which meets the needs of the various constituencies in a large school and how much impact a schedule has on teachers’ ability to teach and students’ ability to learn.
Factors which impact a Master Schedule
The most obvious factors which impact the creation and adjustment of a Master Schedule were the number of classrooms, students and class sections in the school. It is wasteful and ineffective to hire a teacher and assistant to conduct a Grade 3 class of only four students or to pay a science teacher a full-time wage to teach only two sections each day. It is equally unreasonable to ask that same science teacher to conduct seven different classes every day or to ask the Grade 3 teachers to accommodate 40 students in a single classroom. So, logic would dictate, the Master Schedule must begin with a balance between enrollment, faculty, facility and academic requirement
Of course, as with most obvious truths in education, this proved far easier to propose than to accomplish. Faculty hiring should be completed in April or May, but student enrolment is often not finalized until the opening of school in the following August. This leads to the unavoidable problem of having too many students or not enough teachers at the last minute, which can cause a Principal to hire faculty based more on availability than talent, which is sub-optimal for obvious reasons. Additionally, even if the number of students, classes and faculty are in balance, it can be difficult to arrange class periods throughout the day so that each student is available at the same time as the teacher he or she needs and while there is a room available in which they can meet. The easiest way to solve this problem is to limit the number of possibilities to that, for example, every student in Grade 7 takes one of three English classes during the same period, but this limits the number of elective choices you can offer and makes it impossible for a gifted student to take a class with a higher grade, for example, or for a student facing difficulty to work with a resource teacher without missing required class time.
Software Solutions
This second problem, the logistical conflict of limited resources of time, space and human resources, is the sort of dilemma well-suited to computer assistance. Senior Systems, for example, includes a scheduling module which can receive student requests for classes then produce an optimized Master Schedule which allows the largest number of students to get the highest priority classes. While this sort of algorithmic approach can overlook several subjective factors, we used it to create our first-draft schedule, which was then carefully adjusted to allow for these fuzzier variables.
For example, one math teacher may prefer to teach all of her classes in a single room while another might require a computer lab for only one of his sections. Some students may prefer a particular teacher while others may be involved in a sport which pulls them out of Eighth Period too often for them to use it for an Advanced Placement class. In our case, we solved a class conflict by asking the AP Computer Science teacher to agree to use a Laptop Cart in the Library whenever his Computer Lab was needed for computer-based standardized testing. The conflict only existed for two three-week periods but it was a factor the software didn’t allow for and creative thought was needed to come up with the solution. This episode, among others, taught me several things about scheduling software:
- First, tools of this sort are only as accurate as the data they are given. This is the GIGO Rule of Computers (“Garbage In, Garbage Out”) and, while I was aware of it in theory, the Computer Science conflict reminded me of it in a very practical way.
- Secondly, even the most elegant software solution will not be effective unless it is operated by people who understand it. One can not simply follow a list of instructions to produce a school schedule; the process must be reflective, creative and considered. The schedule I produced was riddled with conflicts, inefficiencies and impossible transitions, while the same tool in Mrs. F’s experienced hands yielded far more elegant results.
- Finally –and most critically- I learned that no tool, no matter how powerful it is, can make up for a lack in basic communication. Several of our students were forced into classes they had no interest in simply because the critical preference wasn’t communicated to the right Counselor at the right time. When working with a system as complex as a Master Schedule, knowledge is power. Every decision one makes impacts every other one from that point onward, so sharing data is important.
How a Master Schedule impacts teaching and learning
My conversations with Mr. H yielded the most interesting findings about the relationship between schedules and learning. First and foremost, school leadership is about the management of resources and putting students in the same room with a teacher who is prepared to teach a class effectively is the best way to ensure that learning occurs. Unfortunately this is not simple. Since every scheduling decision affects every other, compromise is the name of the game; but, as he taught me, we simply can’t compromise on our students’ learning opportunities. This humbled me.
The process taught me to recognize how critical it is to plan a complete course of study for students, thinking years ahead in order to make sure they complete required courses without sacrificing too many chances for elective study and creative expression. Effective school scheduling is a fine balancing act which requires a dedication to a clear, mission-based action plan. With that understanding in place, the specific scheduling software tool one uses is almost beside the point as long as the mission is clear.