A Question of Time
This fall, Exploreschool cohorts are ‘rolling up their sleeves’, getting real and working hard to address the temporal design challenge, identified as the key to unlocking all other components of the NEXTschool model:
“To create a high school timetable that engages students in interdisciplinary study and
maximizes the opportunities for them to apply curricular competencies in relevant ways.”
The proposed timetable needs to fulfill the essential NEXTschool components:
- Individual subjects regrouped into curriculum clusters
- Daily planning for teachers to meet with each other and with students
- Teacher workloads and student times-on-subject are ‘annualized’
- Minimum of 20% of student time spent on community-based problem-solving
- Teachers and students work in a cluster of 170 students and 10 teachers
- Teachers are assigned to an interdisciplinary team within their learning hub
In addition, the timetable must adhere to the relevant parameters of the provincial basic school regulations and the teachers’ collective agreement, as well as any aspects of each school’s internal context – including its mission, values, facilities and transportation schedules. The challenge is complex but it is do-able.
Heritage Regional High School principal Sujata Saha sees the task as one that requires the design teams to be both “mindful and creative” – something she is confident her colleagues will be able to accomplish – she is excited to see what they come up with!
Here are some of the prompts and resources that our Temporal Designers are using as they take a human-centered approach to the redesign and engage in developing viable prototypes for their school community to consider:
- Does lunch have to be 45 minutes? Rethinking school schedules to support innovation – small changes can be powerful!
- In some current models, “students don’t move enough and feel like a nuisance” – read more about this here: Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns
- Explore five different models of innovative schedules that facilitate differentiation, teacher collaboration and more!
- This article, Time Management with PBL, shares some ideas of how to integrate project-based learning into the timetable – an essential component of NEXTschool!
- Incorporating Flextime to personalize the learning experience
- This article reminds us to think about time as a resource not a constraint – and to revisit the relationship between time and learning.
We can’t wait to share the prototypes with you when they’re ready. In the meantime, if you have any other resources to pass on to our Exploreteams or if you have any questions, please send them to us at nextschool@learnquebec.ca.
https://hosted.learnquebec.ca/nextschool/2019/10/10/a-question-of-time/NEXTschool This fall, Exploreschool cohorts are ‘rolling up their sleeves’, getting real and working hard to address the temporal design challenge, identified as the key to unlocking all other components of the NEXTschool model: “To create a high school timetable that engages students in interdisciplinary study and maximizes the opportunities for them...lizfalco liz@lizfalco.caAdministratorNEXTSchool