Like their students, teachers often greet the arrival of August with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. The coming year, educators know, will soon test their carefully crafted teaching plans. As the months go by, however, many teachers find themselves forced to sacrifice some lesson plans as they race to cover any untaught topics that will appear on the all-important state assessments at the end of the year. Experienced teachers might expect this, but newer educators can easily find themselves overwhelmed as the year progresses and they race to prepare their students.
In an effort to combat this problem, some school systems have begun developing management plans that outline where teachers should be during different weeks of the school year. However, not all subject areas lend themselves so readily to such time lines, and some education experts have openly wondered whether this kind of scheduling helps or hurts the teachers—and students—that they are designed to assist.
According to experts, more school systems are beginning to implement calendar plans to help their teachers prepare students for state tests. "This is the beginning of a trend," says Mike Schmoker, an education consultant in Flagstaff, Ariz., and author of the book Results: The Key to Continuous School Improvement. "Not enough schools are operating on such organized, collective time frames, but this is truly an idea whose time has come."
By having such outlines available, Schmoker and others assert, teachers can better track their lesson plans and adjust them throughout the school year. In addition to making life easier for educators, the schedules improve the quality of instruction through greater cooperation and consistency among teachers. "I see more collaboration between teachers now than I ever did before we had the schedules," says Sarah Shoob, a social studies coordinator with Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia. "Now, thanks to the schedules, teachers are working as teams so they can cover the same material at the same time. The schedules have really been an invaluable tool for them to pace themselves."
In Fairfax County, the school year follows a quarterly system. "For our 6th grade classes, we suggested that teachers spend two weeks reviewing geography, three weeks studying Native Americans, three more weeks on exploration, and four weeks on colonial America," says Shoob. "With this as the time frame, educators should be starting colonial America by November, and they should cover colonial America and the Revolutionary War in the early part of the second quarter, and so on."
Teachers are not the only ones whose jobs are made easier by time lines, how-ever. "If a 5th grade class and a 3rd grade class are both going to study ancient Egypt during the year, the schedules help librarians ensure that the proper resources are available when each class covers its unit," Shoob points out. This is particularly important, she says, because although 3rd and 5th graders may not usually rely on the same resources, English-as-a-second-language students in the 5th grade may need to consult 3rd grade resources when writing their reports. "These schedules have been crucial for other people besides the teachers," Shoob adds.
Some of those people, according to Shoob and others, include school administrators as well. "A lot of administrators I've talked with have told me that they now have a lot more basic information with time lines," says Jack Greene, a science coordinator in Fairfax County public schools. "If one teacher is not where the others are, the administrator can discuss this with the teacher, so the calendar helps promote communication and feedback."
Although some teachers might feel uneasy about such close supervision, the reaction to the schedules has been largely positive, according to Greene. "This has been especially helpful for our new and beginning teachers because it really helps them determine what they need to be covering," he says.
Handle with Care
Despite these benefits, however, some education specialists have emphasized the need for care when implementing course schedules on a widespread basis. "Schools and districts need to give teachers very specific guidance about what needs to be covered," says Bob Marzano, a senior fellow at Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning in Aurora, Colo. "In much of the country, schools and districts have just given general guidelines as to what's supposed to be covered, and if a school or district is going to provide guidelines and schedules, it needs to do them in a way that does not identify so much material that it becomes impossible to cover it all."
That spirit of trying to "cover" a large curriculum is what often leads to problems, according to experts. "If the mind-set becomes one of covering a lot of material by a certain date, you may get to teaching it, your students may be memorizing it, but are they really learning it?" asks Doug Harris, an education specialist in Montpelier, Vt., and coauthor of Succeeding with Standards: Linking Curriculum, Assessment, and Action Planning. "That's a question you have to ask."
Another tendency, Harris notes, is that with so much focus on covering material for state tests, students can often experience post-testing lethargy once state exams are completed. This slump can be particularly problematic if there are still several weeks before the school year's end. "What's the implication for the curriculum after the state test?" asks Harris. "Many state tests are usually given in April, and that can be five or six weeks before the end of the school year. If students have the mentality that the school year is over once the test is over, how do you then switch gears and continue with the curriculum?" The lessons coming after the test, he warns, will be "orphaned" once testing is complete.
Even more troubling, Harris points out, this post-testing lethargy is not always limited solely to students. "I spoke to one principal in the Midwest who said that his biggest fear was not the state test itself but rather how he was supposed to lead people after the inevitable letdown that would follow it," says Harris. "Adults can find themselves thinking along these lines just as much as students."
A final concern, experts say, is that although schedules work well for subjects such as science and social studies, they do not necessarily work for subjects such as language arts. "Language arts is not a time-based curriculum," says Pat Fege, a K–12 language arts coordinator for Fairfax County. "It's not the kind of content that has to be memorized at certain points of the school year. You can't separate all the aspects and say, 'I'm going to do punctuation by October,' for example."
Other experts share Fege's view. "Sched- ules may work well with content-oriented subjects like math, science, and history," says Harris. "But if you're teaching reading or language arts, those subjects don't lend themselves quite so readily." A particular concern, he notes, is that once school systems determine that a subject may not be "schedule-able," they may minimize it so more time can be devoted to preparing students for state exams. "That results in a narrowing of the curriculum," Harris says. "Art, reading, music, and other subjects can all get lost as a result."
Sizing It All Up
Yet despite these understandable concerns, the trend toward classroom scheduling is likely to continue in the coming years as schools look for ways to help their students meet state standards. For school systems unfamiliar with management plans and scheduling, the challenges of developing workable time lines can be daunting. The key, experts say, is for school systems to develop plans the same way they develop workable standards: by making sure that teachers are involved from the beginning.
"Teacher input was fundamental when we prepared our management plans," says Greene. "We sat down with groups of teachers at the elementary and high school levels and worked for three days on what would be good and why, and those teachers' ideas and thinking was behind the generation of those plans." This approach, he and others say, is critical if schedules are to be both thorough enough to cover the material and realistic in their scope. "The teachers that we brought together really felt that these were their plans and their guidelines," Greene adds. "It wasn't something generated from on high, and that's why I feel it's been so successful."
By planning out the school year with teacher input, school systems can go a long way toward making the year more manageable for teachers and more valuable for students. The approach also helps remove a great deal of the intimidation teachers and students experience every fall when they return to school. "It's hard to think about the whole year ahead of you when you're a new teacher," says Fege. "But if these things can be addressed in advance, it's really a big help."