The power of scheduling in middle school teaming: Flexibility, creativity, and student-centered learning

At Mayfield Middle School, as we sought to create personalized and more meaningful learning experiences for our students, we realized that a typical, traditional schedule was not always conducive to the types of learning experiences we wanted to create. Teachers had great ideas for projects and practices that would incorporate more critical thinking, communication, and creativity; we also had a vision for interventions that would meet students where they are. But we kept running into the same obstacle: time. There were too many transitions that sapped momentum, and students had little to no agency to decide how their days were spent. It was too difficult to carve out space and time to truly intervene with small groups or individual students. As a result, we began to reconsider how time should be spent throughout the day.

We realized that, at times, we needed to break free from a “traditional” schedule-one in which students cycle through 45- to 50-minute periods with time allocated for lunch and electives. Instead of always following a traditional schedule, we were challenged to look at time differently—flexibly. Our teams have about five hours with students per day. We wondered, How can we use it differently? How can we use it better? We began asking questions like, Do kids need to be in each class for the same amount of time every day? Do they need to travel in their predetermined class groupings at all? Could we work together to give more time to literacy and math skills?

In an effort to answer these questions, teams and teachers were given the agency to restructure the day to best suit their instructional goals. Rather than trying to squeeze our vision into a daily bell schedule…