The Master Schedule as the Antagonist of Pedagogical Innovation

Ownings and Kaplan (2012) observe that many school structures, and thus their respective students’ learning outcomes, remain dormant because most educational leadership are unable or unwilling to go beyond what has already been established by previous administrations, very much reminiscent of the neighbor in Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” where, when pressed by the poem’s narrator on why they needed a wall to separate their properties as the oft-crumbling rock structure only divided their trees, he echoed his father’s hollow justification for the wall: “Good fences make good neighbors.” This is especially the case on school campuses when it comes to the resource reallocation of time. Many (maybe most) administrators use their predecessor’s master schedule as a template, sometimes even replicating it exactly, to structure how instructional time is to be used throughout the school day. Consequently, these schools are not in a position to accommodate the learning needs of their current students, needs that are quite different than what had been evident a decade or even three to five years prior. In a report titled “Allocating Resources and Creating Incentives to Improve Teaching and Learning,” Plecki et al (2006) points out what educational leaders must focus on the following when called upon to reallocate time: “rearranging time for instruction and other interactions with students, making time for collaboration and professional learning related to learning improvement agendas, expanding time available for learning improvement activities, and guiding the use of restructured time toward a learning improvement agenda” (p. 29). In terms of expanding the time available for learning improvement activities, tutoring has become the gold standard of instructional interventions as it gives a struggling student the opportunity to improve on a particular skill at his/her own pace and receiving instruction from either a teacher or a peer who has customized his/her guidance to fit that student’s individual needs. In fact, Slavin (1987) and Bloom (1984) have found that students who receive tutoring improve significantly not just academically, but also in terms of their work ethic and motivation.

Where I’m currently teaching, tutoring is provided to the students; however, it is only available after school as if it were an extracurricular activity. Most of the students who take advantage of this program, use the time and the space provided (the library) to do their homework and not to receive individualized interventions. The students who would benefit most from tutoring do not go, for they view it as “more school” and something that would cut into their free time. There is also a lunchtime academic intervention program that 9th and 10th graders who are not passing their core classes are compelled to attend and, consequently, lose out on their non-academic time (essentially recess) that happens during lunch, so it is seen as more as a punishment than as succor.

Last year, upon witnessing many students struggle with writing as well as many teachers (especially non-English teachers) shy away from or just downright refuse to give the students formal writing assignments, claiming that such an activity is peripheral to their particular discipline (which is totally erroneous, considering the amount of writing they did for their non-English major in college) or that they do not have the pedagogical skill set to give their students appropriate feedback so that they would ultimately improve in their ability to write, I proposed to administration that the high school should create a writing lab class, which would take place during the final period of the day, where struggling writers would receive support from the student tutors. A Google Classroom site would be created to provide resources to tutees to use as well as a means to communicate with the tutors. Also, Google Forms/Sheets/Trello would be used as a mechanism that teachers use to refer students to the lab and to keep track of who actually goes and who does not. I went on to remind them of John Hattie’s (2016) exhaustive study regarding the influences on student learning, observes that peer tutoring has a .55 influence and effect size, which is higher than homework, parental involvement, and teacher in-service education. In fact, according to his findings, the effect of peer tutoring is as impactful on the person doing the tutoring as on the person being tutored but only when the tutoring sessions are structured, when the tutors have received training, and when the tutor and tutee are different ages. With this in mind, this lab would be comprised of Juniors and Seniors who will be trained by a supervising teacher to

• Go over the prompt/assignment with the student
• Listen to the student as he/she reads his/her paper aloud
• Ask open-ended questions on higher-order concerns (prompt, thesis, audience and purpose, and organization and purpose) and
• Address the student’s remaining concerns.

I concluded by explaining to the administrative team that this class could be the beginning of a partnership between the high school and the local university as the student tutors could receive training from representatives of the writing lab begin; furthermore, candidates from the university’s credentialing program could be brought in as additional tutors, which would fulfill one of the program’s requirements and give these aspiring teachers the opportunity to work with students. Unfortunately, the administrative team has yet (it has now been over about 8 months since the initial meeting) to make a decision about this lab, and many of my colleagues, who have also presented similar ideas to administrative teams throughout the district, have informed me that a program like this writing lab, although a good idea that would benefit the students, preparing them for the rigors of college and the private market, is seen as disruptive to the master schedule, so it probably will not happen.

Henry David Thoreau once declared, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” Immersed in nature, the American Transcendentalist saw time for what it actually is-a manmade construct used to measure life, not life itself. Many schools have ignored Thoreau’s perspective as structured time and thus compartmentalized learning is the basis for everything that happens on a campus. The initial bell rings, the learning commences; a subsequent bell chimes, the learning stops abruptly. Consequently, schools are metaphorical factories, instilling in the students a structure that was prevalent in a bygone era, a product of a bygone economic system. If schools are to truly prepare the students for this present job market, which is no longer based upon industrial economic structures, education leaders need to have a more fluid approach to time and scheduling, maybe making a schedule that allows for large blocks of time where varied disciplines can engage, even blend, with each other. Ultimately, these leaders must be bold enough to break away from the past and to look at what is happening in our society right now.