Educational justice coach, Lindsay Lyons, and here on the time for Teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about core curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go. Welcome to episode 158 of the time for teacher podcast. Today, we're talking about teacher schedules that leverage team time and enable class visits. So in this episode, I'm really inviting you to dream big. There are some big asks around scheduling that may be unfamiliar to you. New to you feeling a little daring. And I'm excited to share a lot of key studies and tips and strategies that will support you in this endeavor. If you are ready to create that space for teachers within the work day to work in teams, collaborative planning, do some awesome innovative td things like visiting each other's classes during their prep period.

All right, let's get to how. So in this episode, I, as I said, I'm inviting you to Dream Bank to support student achievement, ultimately to improve teacher retention, to improve educator well being all the things teachers right now and really always have been overwhelmed, stressed, exhausted all the things that are hard, the educational system of course is not set up to support teachers mental and emotional wellness, let alone pay them well. I understand that. And since we are focused on systems transformation in this mini series here on the podcast, this month, we are going to think about the systems that we can revise to stop putting the burden on individual educators to really self care their way out of their burnout and figure out how to teach well on their own time. Um When they are not afforded the opportunities within the school day, taking a lot of planning home, taking a lot of grading home, doing all these things. So this is a huge topic to tackle. We're gonna focus on teacher schedules today. So why are we focusing specifically on teacher schedules? Well, again, these are the structures. Um but also that from Hattie's research, we know the thing that has the largest impact on student learning is collective teacher efficacy.

And so when we think about how teachers build that efficacy, it's through professional learning, this is going to include opportunities to collaborate, learn from and with peers, have enough time to really thoughtfully and effectively plan instruction. It's hard to do that in 10 minutes, but right before the lesson. So in many schools, this is just really not possible at this moment, the way their school schedules are set up during the school day. This is expected of teachers outside of the school day, which contributes to 80 hour work weeks and teacher burnout, right? So this excerpt from a article reimagining the school day, which I have found very insightful and I will link in the blog post for this episode. There's gonna be several things I'm gonna share that are gonna be linked in here. So it may be a good blog post to check out after you're done listening or alongside listening, depending on how you're listening. And that's gonna be at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 58. So here's the quote from this article, teachers in the United States reported spending 27 hours of teaching out of 45 hours of work per week compared to teachers in Singapore who teach for only 17 hours per week, that's 10 hours less per week.

And teachers in Finland who teach for a total of 21 hours per week. Schools in these countries prioritize time for planning collaboration, recognizing that developing and executing, executing, excuse me lessons, take time in preparation. Later in the article, they say quote in another analysis of more than 100 and 20 school districts, the most common length of time allotted for planning was 45 minutes per day. End quote. So we're really giving teachers a ton of time in front of students, which theoretically is not a bad thing, but when we only give them 45 minutes per day to plan, whoa, that is not much time at all. What is that for less than four hours a week? Three hours, 45 minutes a week. Yep. That's right. Three hours and 45 minutes to teach 27 hours. And honestly, like that's, that's the average, right? Or on average. This is how much they spend. I can remember a school where I was working far more than that in front of students. So lots of time in front of students and not a lot of time to plan. And where is the collaborative teacher team time?

Right. Grade team department team. Where is the embedded PD where I get to go see someone else's class? It doesn't really exist in a lot of spaces in the current way that our school schedules are set up. Now. This is not to say that folks don't do this. There are so many examples. I'm gonna share a lot of them in the episode today where they do it better and we're going to learn from them. So innovative scheduling models, let's check them out. Let's visit schools that do this. Well, if we can, if you know, of some check them out, go see it in action, interview, their leaders, their teachers um hop on a call with them if you can get on Zoom. That's great. Even email them and ask them a question like how did you come to this? How is it working for you? Where did you reallocate this time? How are you funding this? Does it cost more? Maybe we're making some assumptions that it's not possible when it is. We're just not sure the logistics behind the scenes. So seeing what's possible, great start, you can find a ton of those links to examples either within this blog post or also within the blog post.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna link to uh make time quick guide freebie that you can check out as well. That has even more examples in there. Now, here are some specific ideas to consider that can increase teacher planning time. So let's start with the strategies and then I'll share a case study when relevant step one or idea one is really early dismissal or late start. So there are a lot of folks but it's becoming, I think a lot more popular, particularly in Massachusetts, Framingham, which is where I live in Massachusetts. Their school district has like early release, Thursdays and they just do like every Thursday is early release as far as I know and they do the kind of early dismissal that's, you know, maybe an hour or so earlier and that's just like students go home. Teachers are doing this. Other schools in Massachusetts have seen do like four half day P DS on, for example, Thursdays every couple of months, you have like a half day PD. So they're kind of just reallocating some time so that it is chunked more thoughtfully.

Um and they can do it in that way. Another idea is to reallocate tasks. So, so many teachers miss out on planning time or collaboration time more specifically because they're doing things like recess duty, lunch, duty, other um circular six tasks or whatever you call them in your school or district. I have seen and I have worked in schools where community members are hired as staff members to do these duties. So not requiring the teacher degree to do this, right. We're, we're really just building community. We're hiring a member of the community that might need a job. We are enabling teachers to take their lunch and use the time the kids are at lunch to actually plan as a separate thing from taking their own lunch. Um We are inviting recess to be a time where yes, they can go out and play and you get to plan. So if you have, you know, whoever the teachers you see at recess time are out and about and you're kind of chatting with them on the the outdoor space that you have.

Um think about having that opportunity to chat with them in a structured space that was like a o team meeting, right? Another option for reallocating tests or taking some tasks away from teachers is administrators can teach one class reallocate like an E A intervention period or a math intervention period. Or um I know a lot of administrators who want to kind of stay connected to the classroom. I think if I were ever to, that got to be part of the classroom, I would be interested in a formal leadership role. I just never wanted to be completely divorced from like the actual teaching component, the instructional component. I think there's a lot of leaders who crave that and so try to find that balance, right? And that also might mean taking some things off administrators plate. So there's a, there's a kind of a ladder of shifting here but help teachers out, take a class even if it's, you know, um an sel block or an intervention block or an elective um that you're qualified to teach for another option. You can use intervention enrichment or club time blocks.

I kind of was getting into this a little bit in the last one where we staff those intervention blocks exclusively with paraprofessionals, aides, social workers, counselors, uh instructional coaches, media, specialist, community partners. So like someone like uh a nonprofit organization, I know someone does this with girl scouts, um or the scouts, you could do this with uh a local. I I know in the student voice research. They have done this with um local universities and students come in and they support the high schoolers or middle schoolers, elementary schoolers, whatever grade band you're teaching to learn research skills, to be effective leaders in their school communities. So you could also use this time of course for clubs, project intensives, internships, community service. There's a lot of different things that you could do where folks are, students are taken care of by other folks, right? They are being educated and supported through these other mediums and in community service and internships, right? They're actually out in the community connected with these organizations take some time up front to set all of that up and get those connections in place.

But they're really effective once they're done. So for example, um at a Hamilton Elementary school, this is a sample third grade schedule and and Fridays 10 minutes before dismissal, they have a 40 minute club time block. So they have that time where the students do their club routines and the teachers have that time to do cross team vertical planning. So like a department team. Another example is urban academies community service block every Wednesday afternoon, all of their students leave and the teachers do like a full like, I think it's like a three hour planning block where they have like their staff meeting during that time, they do PD, they do like team planning, but they're just like hyper focused students are out of the building. Um And this is, this is actually what their website vin Hows website says about this time. He said every student must participate in community service on Wednesday afternoons. This participation permits students to learn about careers and college opportunities through real life experiences at their placement. Students learn how to work with adults productively assume responsibility for tasks, both menial and challenging and report back to the school community about their placement and its focus. So there's also kind of this hub for uh a space to kind of come back and reflect within the school as well.

1/4 option project based intensive. I mentioned this briefly in the last one. But here's an example, generation schools in New York City, their secondary school schedule gives teams two weeks of professional collaborative time that it is staggered throughout the year. This is super innovative. I love this idea. So students are actually in intensive with the college and career intensive team. So in this model, in the school, the teachers are organized into grade level teams and then there's also a college and career intensive team that college and career intensive team rotates from grade to grade over the course of the year and they end up spending a month with students exploring college and career pathways. So teachers in that team where the the grade that the college and career type of team is is working with that month, they're not responsible for students that month at all. And so they can use that time for their school breaks. They do a little bit of a longer school year and for their team collaboration time. Now by staggering the teacher break, the really, you know, the instruction is much bigger. You don't necessarily have to do that that way. But think about a college and career intensive team coming in for two weeks where if you don't have students, right?

And you just get to plan out the next, you know, several months of school. Oh, it would be so, so cool. Um Urban Academy also does something similar where twice per year they have schoolwide intensives. I think you could do this with like different classes, like an arts class or a really in depth like lab portion of a science class or like, you know, anyone could do this project where it's like, oh, I'm taking this, think of it as like a super large field trip or something, right? Where we're doing that where we could go out in the community, but we could also do it in a classroom. I think it would be super cool to reallocate time in that way. OK. 1/5 and final idea, leverage existing PD time for collaboration and peer learning. So if you already have time, right, like once you have kind of the space and this is the ultimate goal, you've created the space within the schedule for teachers to be able to learn and collaborate, create the structures that enable them to use it well and in innovative ways that might be different from a team meeting. Although I do love the idea of team meetings, but structure those team meetings. So if you have a team meeting vertically align a rubric that lasts throughout the grade band, um bring student work and quote unquote norm expectations of this grade level acclaim looks like this.

So this grade level, well, it looks like this, right? And really get clear on how we assess students and the expectations of students across grade levels on the same priority standards. That would be a huge help for many school districts that I know if, if we were able to use time purposefully in that way. And that just really takes some thought, some agenda planning a commitment to doing that work and of course, that ongoing time to meet with that team, you can also invite teachers in like a typical staff meeting time to lead PD and it might not need to be like, you know, full slides and everything, but just share a promising practice. Here's something I tried in my class. Here's how it went. Here's some samples of the student work, take some questions, uh run teachers through an example, share whatever resources or worksheets or tech tools, whatever that you use in those lessons or types of lessons. So really just centering like the the job embedded PD stuff, right. That's like you did this this week. Just share it with the larger staff. That's all we need for a PD. It doesn't necessarily need to be, we're hiring someone to come in or we're having the principal create something, right?

It needs to be meaningful. So let's just focus on what's already working and just try to do it more in more spaces around the school. Another amazing thing that I love and I'm gonna give you a kit for this. Um So you can pick up this freebie again at the blog post, Lindsay, Beth lines.com/blog/one 58. This is a pure visitation starter kit for pure visitation time. And what that's gonna do is it's gonna give you some structure to create a schedule to have folks say, hey, I'd love to have people come in and see this thing in action. Here's what I'm working on. Here's the time of my class, the location of my class, you can do this interdistrict. So it doesn't even have to be someone at your school. But if you have like back to back planning periods or something, you can create space for that and then you're, you there's like a sheet in there of like, what do I do when I'm in there? What are the things I'm looking for? What's the question I have that I wanna follow up with the teacher on or something that I'm going to plan to use in my class once I go back to my classroom. So I really think that this is, talk about job embedded PD. Right. Like I have a prep period, I'm gonna go down the hall, I'm gonna see something in action where this teacher is teaching the same students and it's going well for them.

Even though I'm struggling, I'm gonna learn what's out there or I'm planning to do more discussions. I'm not really sure we're getting stuck. This teacher does really good discussions. So I'm just gonna check it out. They work in the same school or they work in the same district. Like, let's just see what's working for them and learn from them. Um It would be so cool and it doesn't cost you anything else because you're not bringing anyone in, right? You're just leveraging the brilliance that's already in the space. So as a final tip, I would invite teachers and I speak from experience here. I was a teacher in a school where I got to do the like quote unquote master schedule for everyone and play with these, right? I was, I had like a committee that was giving me ideas and stuff and then I got to like, run with it and like, share out these ideas and then we voted as a staff on which one we wanted to do. So invite teachers, students, families, non instructional staff, invite as many folks that are interested that are innovative as you can to creatively brainstorm scheduling ideas, give them the legal parameters, of course. So whatever schedules you come up with, you have to make sure there's X amount of, you know, minutes or hours of instructional time in this subject and, you know, school days can't be shorter than this amount of time, whatever all the parameters are.

But then just let them dream, let them dream it up because those big ideas, like you may not get to do all of them. But if you can find one of them where it's like, yep, that meets the parameters. Yep, this is all right. It's gonna take a little reallocation. Let's find someone who's done something similar. Let's interview them like let's ask them how they did it. It is possible and sometimes you just need the dream to get you started on that path to making it happen. So once you do that, I'd love to hear back from you. Come on the show, tell us how you did it. But go ahead, start dreaming if you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane sapper and Jamila Dugan talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book street data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period? I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling to yourself as you listen to right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers.

Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better podcast network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.