Prioritizing Student Learning: Rethinking Time, Space, and Money

When done right, school can provide each individual child with experiences that will advance and deepen his or her problem-solving capacity, creativity, caring, and ownership of learning. Besides ensuring that all students have compassionate, effective teachers creating classroom conditions and opportunities for these things to occur, a school principal's primary responsibility is to allocate the scarce resources of time, space, and funding to maximize children's positive and productive experiences of school.

As with many other public schools in urban districts, Wildwood has been up against some tough resource challenges:

Wildwood International Baccalaureate World Magnet School is a public, non-selective enrollment neighborhood magnet school in an affluent part of Chicago, offering available seats to students city-wide. We have been ADA compliant for decades, thus also receiving students with cognitive diversity and physical and medical fragilities. We have been a receiving school for refugee families. This gives Wildwood a student demographic of unusual economic, racial, cultural, physical, and intellectual diversity. We do our highly innovative and personalized work in this context.

A Range of Solutions

We provide here some of our creative solutions to Wildwood's complex challenges, and how these solutions have affected learning and school culture.

Rethinking Time

Everyone has the same 168 hours per week for everything we need to do. For students in our district, 35 of those hours are spent in school. How do we maximize that time to advance learning and grow compassionate, creative human beings?

We use a master schedule to alleviate student and teacher time conflicts, especially so that teachers won't feel as if they're losing time by adding something extra.

For example, English learners will need support outside of the classroom to learn English, but they also need to be present for core instruction, art, PE, and other elective courses, as well as the extra language support. Those elective courses may be areas where they thrive, so rather than pull them out of those classes, we utilize the master schedule to ensure that we're providing our diverse learners with a complete educational experience. If there's only one teacher supporting English learners, that teacher should be able to provide support in all the classrooms, or pull out groups of students for language support.

We also use the master schedule to ensure common preparation time for supporting teacher collaboration. I find that I get more from my teachers at times that work best for them. If we can't find a meeting time during the day, we offer teachers extended-day pay from our Next Generation Learning Challenge grant. When it's difficult to align common preparation time for grade- and content-level teams, I'm allowed one principal-directed preparation each week, which I schedule during their lunch. Their preparation time is 60 minutes, and their lunch is 45 minutes. Even though we lose 15 minutes of collaboration time, our teachers still have that opportunity for working together.

We also schedule time for personalized, student-driven learning. We create an opportunity in every teacher's day with a 45- to 60-minute block for their kids to work on projects, collaborate, or finish assignments. Teachers can observe how students choose to use their learning time, manage their workloads, and work independently, with teacher support, or across grade levels.

A large piece in leveraging the master schedule is programming flexibilities that meet your students' and teachers' needs, so I create the master schedule during the summer. (It takes about 20 hours to schedule one day.) We can't afford a programmer, and I don't want to add that workload to a teacher's summer -- although, ideally, creating a master schedule is a partnership with your teachers. Here's my process:

Creating Space

Wildwood hasn't had a lunchroom, library, teachers' lounge, or principal's office for the last several years. We've had to creatively use closets, the stage, hallways, and the lunch manager's office as meeting spaces. Even one of our women's restrooms was converted to an office that became an experiential children's museum (our makerspace Tinker Tank) and then a resource room.

Regardless of whether or not a school is overcrowded, here's how we've fostered a classroom and school culture of inquiry and collaboration with learning spaces over which students have a degree of control:

Stretching Money

There's no easy way to stretch a budget when every penny allocated to a school is used on teacher and staff salaries and benefits, but we have pushed the envelope on a few things:

Impacts on Learning

In the 2015-16 school year, Wildwood is taking student-directed inquiry to a new level. We're redefining personalized learning as "personalized International Baccalaureate," giving all students the opportunity to co-create and manage their own learning plans within the context of their current IB unit.

In the summer of 2015, Wildwood teachers are refining their IB planners, course maps, and quarterly curriculum maps to include opportunities for student voice and choice, personalized strategies and skills acquisition, daily and weekly goal setting, and ongoing reflection.

Some of the student work samples in this case study demonstrate our early efforts at this work, including:

By NCLB standards, Wildwood went from a low- to high-performing school by developing a data-driven culture that included intensive test prep. Components of a rigorous IB program added value to these efforts, but were not implemented in a school culture of student-driven inquiry and student ownership of learning until several years into IB authorization. Building such a culture has created a school that gets the numbers as far as achievement and growth, but does so in an environment of love, creativity, collaboration, and curiosity.

Wildwood proves that it's possible to build and sustain a public school that deeply embraces the values of progressive education and still gets competitive test results. In 2014-15, we not only exceeded national performance levels on all grades for NWEA, but we were second for growth in reading and math in our network of high-performing schools.

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