News for Collegiate School Families and Friends
Fall 2014
Quality Time
New schedules designed to enhance student experience
T
.here are, on average, seven hours in every school day. How we divide up that time has everything to do with the daily student experience. For the last 20 years, we’ve divided the day in the same way while the ways we teach and learn were changing. To ensure that our daily class schedules best supported these evolving teaching and learning trends, over the past two years, the Lower, Middle and Upper Schools evaluated their daily schedules. Each school considered options for improvements and created new structures for the 2014-2015 school year. The new schedules are designed to increase productive classroom time and opportunities to implement projectbased, collaborative and crossdiscipline learning experiences. Increased time to differentiate instruction and encourage more critical and creative thinking will also be benefits of the new schedules. The new schedules were developed with a great deal of thought including the expertise of Independent School Management (ISM), a well-known and well-respected independent school consulting firm. This work was designed to both support our challenging academic curriculum and to enhance the overall student experience. “We believe our new schedules better support these important goals by using time a bit differently,” says Interim
Academic Dean Debbie Miller. “We are excited about the increased and different types of student learning opportunities that the new schedules will afford us. “For example, our new Lower School six-day and Middle and Upper School eight-day rotation schedules allow for fewer and longer class periods each day. This important change decreases lost time due to students changing classes, increasing teacher/student contact time. Over the course of a school year, this
gained time is meaningful. In summary, our students will be in class more in 2014-15 than in 2013-14,” says Miller. For a number of years, the Collegiate schedule has included approximately six to seven “Late Arrival” days. These days have served as important professional development and collaborative working opportunities for our faculty. This time is designed to strengthen instruction, benefitting every student in the school. Because our new daily class schedules are different and present new instructional possibilities, our faculty need this time to expand and enhance their repertoire of teaching strategies, methods and activities. As a result, we have included nine additional “Late Arrival” days for the 2014-15 school year. For students who need to arrive on campus at their normal times on these days, plans will be in place to allow them to do so. “As we get into the year, I am looking forward to sharing with our community about what the faculty are learning during the new professional development times as well as the creative and innovative ways longer class periods are being used,” says Mrs. Miller. “We are aware that this is a period of adjustment, but we believe that the benefits for both students and teachers will be substantial.”