Redesigning a school around an expanded schedule can be a tremendous opportunity to enhance the school’s capacity to educate and engage students. And like most endeavors with significant rewards, the redesign process is quite complex. Schools must organize many moving parts and accommodate disparate agendas, all while trying to hold true to a unifying vision about how best to educate and motivate children. Therefore, before schools and districts forge ahead, schools and districts must carefully consider: “Is expanded learning time right for our students?”
For those schools and districts committed to designing and implementing an expanded learning time (ELT) school, Massachusetts 2020 has compiled this online planning guide. This guide should be used as a tool to assist superintendents, principals, teachers, union leaders, school partners, parents and others in thinking through the many challenges that will inevitably arise through the ten- to eighteen-month redesign process and to provide some productive ways to overcome these challenges.
The guide is divided into five sections, representing the key areas of activity around which the process revolves. In addition to these five activity areas, each school and district will need to take some initial steps, such as forming a planning team and hiring a facilitator, before diving into the process. The five major areas are:
Within each area (and within “initial steps”), the guide lays out two or three operating principles followed by a series of action steps, in rough chronological order. Posted to the right of these steps are links to sets of questions (referred to as "QS") that stakeholders should address as they move through the redesign process as well as documents and other resources to assist planners. (A composite list of questions appears at the end of each section.) The main body of the guide – along with a listing of the resources – is also available as a single document in Microsoft Word format for easy downloading.
It is important to note that these five areas of activity are highly interdependent and overlapping. Almost every decision in one area affects what can be done in others. (A composite timeline, one for schools opening in September 2007 and one for 2008, illustrates how many different activities must take place simultaneously.) In addition, the school(s) undergoing the process must act in concert with the central administration’s logistical planning and goal setting. For the sake of both organizing the process and focusing efforts on improving student academic outcomes, Massachusetts 2020 recommends that the design of the educational program drive activity in the other areas.
Massachusetts 2020 would like to gratefully acknowledge the Massachusetts Department of Education and, particularly, the Office of School and District Intervention, for its partnership and management of the Expanded Learning Time to Support Student Success Initiative (ELT). Its guidance in the planning and implementation of the ten ELT schools has been critical to the successes of each school. Massachusetts 2020 would also like to recognize the contributions of the ten ELT schools (and the five districts in which they reside) to the development of this guide. Many of the resources contained in the online guide are taken from actual documents prepared and used by these schools and districts, and their own planning experiences deeply inform the guide’s content. More important than providing information for this guide, these schools and districts offer inspiration to future ELT planners and implementers. They have shown that expanding the school day is not only possible, but highly rewarding to students and teachers.
