Making Teamwork Meaningful by Ferriter William M.;Graham Parry; & Parry Graham & Matt Wight

Author:Ferriter, William M.;Graham, Parry; & Parry Graham & Matt Wight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Solution Tree
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Scheduling in Smaller Schools

Building regular periods for collaboration and intervention into the master schedule is easier for larger schools than it is for smaller schools. Size adds flexibility to scheduling. But as we learned from surgeon Atul Gawande in chapter 2, collaboration benefits all professionals whether they work in traditional school settings or not, and as we all know from firsthand experience, intervention opportunities benefit all students. That means the smaller or more nontraditional the school, the more inventive school leaders and their scheduling teams must become to create the structures that make progress possible.

As an example, smaller schools often consider cross-grade intervention opportunities, grouping students by achievement level and need rather than by age. Elementary schools can pair K–2 and 3–5 students for remediation or enrichment around essential skills—literacy, numeracy, identifying bias, being persuasive, or learning to collaborate—instead of around content specific to a single grade level. Thinking traditionally, this creates complications because just about every intervention classroom is likely to have multiaged student groupings. But in progress-driven PLCs, it also creates opportunities to provide targeted instruction that meets students where they are. Buffum et al. (2012) argue that “the prior skill for the second-grader, the core skill for the first-grader, and the enrichment skill for the kindergartner are all the same skill. Why have three different flexible groups, one at each grade level, all teaching the same skill?” (p. 143).

Finally, smaller schools and alternative schools may need to look to outside resources to create time for collaboration and intervention. Is there a group of parents that would be willing to supervise students on a rotating basis to create common meeting times? Would the local school board support early release days once every two weeks to create opportunities for PLTs to meet? Necessity is the mother of invention; as long as a school is committed to figuring out a way to make collaboration happen, it can.

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