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Recommendation One:
Structure the school day to allow sufficient time for direct planning, productive collaboration with colleagues, and overlapping time for mentors and mentees, all embedded within the school day.
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Role Group Strategies:
District Office
Provide schools with models for creating sustained time for collaboration within the school day.
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Finding Time for Faculties to Study Together
Murphy, C. (Summer 1997) Journal of Staff Development v.18 n.3
http://www.nsdc.org/library/publications/jsd/murphy183.cfm
Carleen Murphy provides an extensive list of options used by different schools to create time for teachers to meet in “study groups.” Sample strategies include early release, late start, hiring substitutes, and involving parents or business partners in special activities.
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How Boston Pilot Schools Use Freedom over Budget, Staffing, and Scheduling To Meet Student Needs.
October 2001. Center for Collaborative Education.
http://www.ccebos.org/pilot_resource_study_011015.pdf
This article includes a case study of the Harbor School, which adopted a new schedule with the primary goals of providing common time for teachers to collaborate and intensive time for students in core academic instruction. They achieved their goal in large part by hiring specialists to create more teacher time.
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Rethinking School Resources
Hawley Miles, Karen. District Issues Brief. New American Schools.
http://www.naschools.org/uploadedfiles/rethinking-resources.pdf
Based on her experiences with New American Schools, Karen Hawley Miles writes that schools need more resources to provide common time for teachers to work and learn together. She insists that teachers need time periods longer than 45 minutes to accomplish this work and suggests five ways that schools could create that time. Additionally, she provides recommendations of what districts can do to help schools create time and reports on the tradeoffs or challenges that accompany each strategy.
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District Office
Hire part-time specialist teachers, retirees, and substitutes to cover classes during periods of common planning time.
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Creating a Teacher Mentoring Program
The NEA Foundation for the Improvement of Education. (1999, February).
http://www.nfie.org/publications/mentoring.htm
The authors of this paper emphasize the importance of frequent meetings for mentoring programs to be effective and the difficulty of determining whether teachers should mentor full-time or balance teaching and mentoring. They also describe a program in Anchorage, AK, in which retired teachers help either as mentors or as substitutes for full-time teachers when they meet with their mentees.
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Finding Time for Faculties to Study Together
Murphy, C. (Summer 1997) Journal of Staff Development v.18 n.3
http://www.nsdc.org/library/publications/jsd/murphy183.cfm
Carleen Murphy provides an extensive list of options used by different schools to create time for teachers to meet in “study groups.” Sample strategies include early release, late start, hiring substitutes, and involving parents or business partners in special activities.
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How Boston Pilot Schools Use Freedom over Budget, Staffing, and Scheduling To Meet Student Needs.
October 2001. Center for Collaborative Education.
http://www.ccebos.org/pilot_resource_study_011015.pdf
This article includes a case study of the Harbor School, which adopted a new schedule with the primary goals of providing common time for teachers to collaborate and intensive time for students in core academic instruction. They achieved their goal in large part by hiring specialists to create more teacher time.
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Making Time for Adult Learning
Pardini, P. (Spring 1999) Journal of Staff Development
http://www.nsdc.org/library/publications/jsd/pardini202.cfm
This article highlights different methods used by eight schools across the country to create time for teacher collaboration. Strategies include early release, involving students in community service projects, allowing paraprofessionals to cover classes for a limited period of time, and reassessing how faculty meeting time is currently used. The author provides contact information for each of the profiled schools.
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Think Outside the Clock: Create Time for Professional Learning.
Richardson, Joan. (2002). National Staff Development Council.
http://www.nsdc.org/members/tools/tools08-02.pdf
This article suggests strategies for creating time for professional development and describes a variety of approaches already taken by specific schools and districts. Under “Schools that have Found Time,” the author describes how Madison Park School in Phoenix, AZ, uses two full-time substitutes to provide release time so that teachers can collaborate, do professional development on their own, or work with master teachers.
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Winning the Substitute Game
District Administration. (2004).
http://www.districtadministration.com/page.cfm?p=807
This article provides strategies for attracting and retaining quality substitutes. The authors concentrate on the challenges and concerns of substitute teachers themselves.
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Rethinking the Allocation of Teaching Resources: Some Lessons from High-Performing Schools
Hawley Miles, Karen and Linda Darling-Hammond. (1998). Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 20.1 p. 9-29.
http://www.cpre.org/Publications/rr38.pdf
The study looks at five high-performing schools that have redesigned the way they allocate teaching resources. The article gives concrete ways to reorganize teacher time and identifies six principles of resource allocation among the five schools. Suggestions include reintegrating pull-out programs like gifted or bilingual education into “regular education” settings; creating longer periods of time for teacher planning; assigning students to class groups based on educational strategies rather than standard classifications; and hiring a larger number of part-time specialist teachers to cover longer periods of common planning time.
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