Beneath the surface of timetable changes Rosemary Hipkins
NZCER
You do the best you can. The difficulty is to individualise within an artificial (timetable) constraint. To meet the needs of students’ wishes, and the community, and collective agreements, is hard (Principal comment in 2018 National Survey, Bonne & MacDonald, 2019, p.53.) Space . . . structures the very way we think about learning, through physical, curricular and didactic structures such as classrooms, timetables and deadlines, which organise students in space and time and shape their learning experience, and through spatial metaphors such as distance learning and student-centredness. (Blasco, 2016, p.118)
we carried out some research for the Productivity Commission. They wanted to know more about the relationship between the subject choices that students make in their last years at school and their future work opportunities, in a world where these work opportunities are changing rapidly. That’s not a straightforward question to unpack! We began by gleaning insights from previous research reports. What we found probably won’t surprise you. There is a general bias towards university study as a post-school destination. This is the ‘well-lit’ pathway. Notably, the role of the timetable is integral to this bias:
There is a gap in the research literature where timetabling is concerned. It seems to be one of those aspects of a secondary school education that is largely taken for granted, part of the DNA of modern schooling. Yet several strands of our recent research have detected an appetite for change in timetabling structures and practices. In this article, my aim is to provide you with possible lines of professional inquiry if you are thinking about changing the timetable in your school. On the practical level, this article outlines different types of changes that could be made, and what they might be expected to achieve. I discuss insights and implications from such local research as exists. On a deeper level, I draw on the idea of ‘curriculum space’ (Blasco, 2016) to explore ways in which the timetable constructs students’ experiences of learning. I use the term ‘transformative’ to differentiate substantive changes to learning experiences from tweaks that solve practical problems while leaving traditional sorting and teaching practices, and assumptions about learners and learning, largely unchallenged.
Structures such as the school timetable underpin this bias by constraining the ways in which students can choose combinations of subjects as a programme of study. Advice given as choices are being made keeps the academic pathway well lit, at least for students considered capable of university study by their teachers and schools. Pathways to work or vocational learning are less esteemed and are typically promoted to students considered to be less academically able. This creates problems when assumptions are mismatched with actual demands. Examples include the agribusiness and engineering sectors. Both need highly qualified workers and those who can undertake work that does not need a university degree. (Hipkins & Vaughan, 2019, p.35)
The appetite for change Responses to NZCER’s 2018 survey of secondary school principals conveyed a sense of the appetite for change, but also implied that successfully making changes is likely to be problematic: ■■
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77 per cent of the 167 principals who responded said they had made some change to the timetable in the last 5 years. But some had not retained the changes they had tried. Many of those who had not yet made changes were considering doing so. 47 per cent of the principals (and 36 per cent of trustees) said that timetabling to support a growing range of student learning opportunities was a major issue facing their school.
(Bonne and MacDonald, 2019)
Late in 2019 the timetabling issue again came sharply into view as
It is not just the structure of timetable that matters. The processes and practices that surround it can have a real influence on the way the timetable plays out. Changing one without the other is not likely to achieve the desired goal. This will be a recurring theme in what follows. Following from this first stage of the work, we conducted two focus groups with senior school leaders who have responsibility for timetabling and/or pastoral care and advice systems in the school (Eyre & Hipkins, 2019). It struck us that participants were eager to hear ideas about timetabling innovations that had been tried by others in the focus group. Some called the conversation valuable professional learning, even though our purposes were research purposes. Given the complexities we documented in the work for the Productivity Commission, this interest and attention to timetabling is hardly surprising. Leaders have much to juggle. Meeting the needs of diverse groups is challenging. Making timetabling changes is hard work and creates a lot of uncertainty. On top of all that, there are no guarantees of success. Is it worth it? This is the question I explore in what follows.
N Z Principal | S e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 0
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