March 17 (Journal No. 10)

This week we had a group do their presentation on the topic of scheduling. I must admit that this is one aspect of administration that i know very little about -given this is my first year as a vice-principal at an elementary school.

The group gave us a run-down on aspects of scheduling in various contexts: elementary, secondary, and vocational schools. My experience with scheduling in the secondary school level is that from a teacher. When I was given a schedule, I normally occupied between 24 to 27 periods over a nine day cycle. The thing that interested me the most was the courses I would be given and the amount of prep time this entailed. One year I had 4 preps and this was very difficult to endure. I have already discussed this at length in last week's journal entry.

What I found interesting about the presentation was the amount of work that goes into planning a schedule and the disparity in terms of time involved between elementary and secondary schools. What I mean is that at the elementary level, the obvious difference is that the homeroom teachers workout most of their schedules alone given that they teach their own math, English, science, etc. Or at least, they are able to work out a schedule amongst themselves as cycle teams. The administration is then left with plugging in the specialist courses like French, phys ed. music, computers, etc. This entails less work for the administration than the more complicated schedules at the secondary level.

One interesting tip that was mentioned by the presenters is that phys ed. classes at the elementary level are usually slotted in blocks of time for younger classes together to facilitate equipment set up. This is something that I will be considering when I meet with my principal to set up next year's schedules.

The breakout room activity we were given involved discussing the question of priorirties reflected in the master timetable for out particular schools. One thing that i found interesting was that in one of the secondary schools that I worked as a teacher, students requiring remedial English received instruction 8 days out of a possible 9 day cycle. Normally, English was slotted for 6 periods out of a nine day cycle. Also, these classes never exceeded 15 students per class. At the secondary three level, students were exempt from taking courses like geography in order to receive help from their resource teachers in other courses like math, English, science, etc. I don't believe that this was an ideal situation because this sends students a message that some courses are more important than others. In summary, schedules were modified to meet the special needs of students.

A question that we were asked to consider and respond in our journals this week was: "What makes a good schedule." I believe that first and foremost, the schedule must reflect the special needs of students as described above, but not sacrifice courses considered to be "soft". This is an old problem that deals withcurricular issues like replacing art courses to supplement science and math. I think we needs to have a balanced curriculum that requires more creative ways of providing quality instruction, not quantity. Adding more minutes for math and science will not yield better results. I would like to come back to my experience of teaching remedial English to secondary two students. As I mentioned above, I was teaching 8 classes over a nine day cycle as oppossed to 6 which was the norm. At the end of the year, I don't believe that this added time helped my students. I think it woulod have been more helpful for them to have a teacher who had some experience teaching "special ed" students. I had absolutely no training, experience, or support during this time. I found other colleagues who also taught this course to be left alone without support. This was one of the most frustrating experiences I had throughout my teaching career. Unfortunately, I was a first year teacher and i was given the assignment that nobody else wanted.

Schedules should be more than just plugging in people in convenient slots. They should be about maximizing your staff's talents to meet the needs of your students. Ideally, this is what one should consider before drawing up a schedule. Shedules should also give teachers proper time to prepare for transitions between supervision and class time. Nothing was more frustrating to me than to be on supervision and then hustle back at the end to my office to prepare for the on-coming class. Another problem was having a last period class and then having to run over to supervision after school. After class, at the end of the day was the time most students needed to see me and I would have to postpone this because i had to rush down to do my supervision. These are things that should be considered when planning class schedules and the accompanying supervision schedules. Not an easy task, but one well worth it for the sake of students and teacher satisfaction. Will I consider these things when given the opportunty to create schedules? I'll defintely try!