Paly’s push for a new schedule has reached a critical phase centered around student input, according to biology teacher Elizabeth Brimhall.
For the next four weeks, the bell schedule action committee plans to hold a number of lunchtime meetings with students to obtain their input on next year’s schedule, according to biology teacher Elizabeth Brimhall, who is leading the process with guidance counselor Susan Shultz.
“We’re going to be doing brown bag lunches for students,” Shultz said. “What we hope to do is to meet with different students once a week for a month or six weeks.”
In addition, the committee has placed a short survey for parents and students to complete on Naviance about their bell schedule preferences. The faculty hopes the ease of filling out the two-question survey will encourage full participation, according to Brimhall.
The committee also has provided research on teen sleep and block schedules on InClass under the “Library Information and Passwords” page. Parents and students can click on the “Bell Schedule Research” link on the left-hand column to become more informed.
After taking into account parent, staff and some student input, the committee has revised the schedule proposals since their initial release in January. Chief among the changes is a consistent start time of 8:15 a.m.
“Based on feedback from parents, students, and staff, we have revised all the schedules to start at 8:15 a.m. [from the original start time of 8:05 a.m.],” Brimhall said. “This addresses concerns about teenagers functioning poorly during early hours of the day while maintaining a reasonable dismissal time of 3:25 p.m.”
According to sleep researcher Mark Rosekind, Ph.D., any change should emphasize a consistent later start time because it caters to teenagers’ natural biological clocks.
“Just based on circadian [biological clock] physiology, the first priority should be the later start time as this directly acknowledges the shift in adolescents’ biological clock moving later,” Rosekind said. “However, the more consistent this start time, the more stable the signals to the circadian clock.”
“Having the once a week later start time is a positive move but should be acknowledged as a once a week recovery opportunity,” Rosekind continued. “Obviously not a substantial change, but still better than having a consistently earlier start time.”
Teacher and staff opinion
In addition, workshops with four teachers from Saratoga High School, San Mateo High School and St. Francis High School in Mountain View enlightened teachers about the four-day block schedule. These discussions were held on Staff Development Day in February to provide teachers with more insight into their options, according to Brimhall.
“They talked about their experience teaching both before and after [switching to the four-day block schedule],” Shultz said. “The feedback that we got was overwhelmingly positive. The first year is difficult because teachers have to revamp their curriculum, but once they do that you usually hear that they don’t want to go back.”
Principal Jacqueline McEvoy said that one agreement between staff and teachers is the need for a day for all seven classes to meet with a four-day block schedule.
“Saratoga’s schedule rotates between A days and B days, so sometimes you’ll meet with a class two times a week and other times you’ll meet three times,” McEvoy said. “We decided we wanted a day where all classes meet, but we haven’t decided yet on which day that will be.”
The four-day block demands a shift in instructional strategies, which may be difficult for some teachers, McEvoy said.
“Teachers will really have to change the way that they are teaching,” McEvoy said. “Lecturing for 90 minutes is not what a block period is for. Teachers really have to be thoughtful about activities during block periods, for the student and the teacher.”
“They [teachers] will need a bigger variety of instructional strategies,” she continued. “We need to give teachers time to develop those and to collaborate with other teachers.”
Although teachers seem to be more excited about the four-day block schedule, they decided against implementing a two-week pilot this spring, according to Shultz.
“My guess is just that teachers didn’t feel a two-week trial period was long enough to really be useful,” Shultz said. “I know with any change we make, it’s just going to be a year-long pilot to try it out and look at the pros and cons. People are ready to make a decision and move forward.”
McEvoy agreed that any schedule change would just be a trial-and-error experiment that the staff will need to re-evaluate at the end of next year.
“What’s great about changing schedules is that we’ll always be working with it,” McEvoy said. “Even after we make a decision at the end of this year, we can modify that at the end of next year after we’ve tried something out. We can still have an ongoing conversation.”
While Brimhall and Shultz say that teachers are eager to make a decision, they are unclear as to what that specific decision is.
“Teacher opinions are really mixed both across and within departments,” Shultz said.
McEvoy added, “We have a real silent majority at Paly among students, teachers, and parents; we need to specifically ask people what they’re thinking or they won’t tell us what decision they’re going to make.”
“It seems that some people are ready to move forward with the four-day block, but they have a lot of questions,” McEvoy continued. “Those may be answered at the end of the year or at the end of another semester.”
Making the final decision
Brimhall said that the bell schedule committee has chosen late April as its target date for making a decision.
“The [bell schedule action] committee will need to take at least a full day to analyze all of the results from surveys, research, and other data and make an informed recommendation to the Ed Council,” McEvoy said. “They’ll need to look at where the opinion is strongest and where people think we need to collect more evidence before moving forward. If everyone just votes ‘I can live with it,’ that’s not really strong support to make a change.”
Mcevoy emphasized that any change should really get teachers involved and excited so that they can lead at the forefront of the change and shape the way the changes will take place in their own classrooms.
“We want teachers to be excited about the change, so that they’re willing to lead the way,” McEvoy said. “This is especially true if we decide to do something big, like implement the four-day block schedule.”
Subsequently, the Ed Council is likely to adopt whatever recommendation the committee makes, according to McEvoy.
“There would have to be a serious flaw for the Ed Council to reject the committee’s recommendation,” she said. “They may modify it, but they know that this has gone through such a long process that it’s a strong recommendation.”
If the committee’s decision is the four-day block schedule and if the Ed Council agrees to that, the Ed Council will put together a plan to get the information out to the community, according to McEvoy. The council would need to put together a master schedule, develop a training plan for teachers and talk about work that teachers may need to do over the summer.
Many people are excited to see the results of this long-term effort unfold, McEvoy said.
“It’s been exciting to see the school go through this process,” she said. “People can’t remember what the last big change was, whether it was the TA [teacher adviser] program 15 years ago or a schedule change, but it’s really exciting to see this ongoing conversation unfold and to think about the big changes that could happen at our school.”