N.Y.C. School Built Around Unorthodox Use of Time

[Patrina]

This article from Tuesday's Education Week is very relevant to the discussion of balancing professional development, planning and teaching time.

--Patrina

N.Y.C. School Built Around Unorthodox Use of Time

Tanya Odums, center left, meets with students to discuss what they learned from a recent school outing. The school has a wellness team in addition to its instructional teams.
—Jessica Rinaldi for Education Week

By Stephen Sawchuk

New York

Superficially, the Brooklyn Generation School, here in the Flatbush area, looks a lot like the other six small public high schools that share space in this tall building, the former South Shore High School.

What’s noticeably different about it, though, is the strength of the relationships among staff members. Teachers can be seen running across the hallways to each other’s rooms. They tease each other good-naturedly in staff meetings. Most importantly, said Principal Terri Grey, the tenor of staff conversations is markedly different.

“They aren’t about something egregious a student did,” Ms. Grey said. “Instead, it’s three teachers standing there, talking about how one of their kids really got the lesson today.”

Teachers here attribute the collegial atmosphere to the public school’s novel way of differentiating teachers’ roles and staggering their schedules. At Brooklyn Generation, teachers instruct only three classes a day, get two hours of common planning with colleagues each afternoon, and have a highly reduced student load—as few as 14 students per class. Yet the restructured scheduling costs no more to operate than a traditional schedules.

To read the rest of the article visit, http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/03/10/24brooklyn_ep.h29.html...

[Ryan Goble]

Patrina thank you so much for adding this timely article re: the discussions we've been rocking on the comment wall!

[Patrina]

Anytime. This sounds like a great place to work.

[Stephanie Young]

This does sound like a great place to work. It actually sounds a little like my former school in it's earlier years (until we moved into a building that could handle more students, which then doubled our population in 2 years). Keeping the classes at less than 20 students is key along with teachers having time to collaborate! I would love to see how their money is allocated in order to run their schedule. Very interesting!

[Shawn LaTorre]

What a great article. It is reminiscent of the one room school house in a way. I mean, that's how closely the teachers seem to monitor the progress and the lives of the individuals in their small group. And for teachers to be able to rotate on and off....teach and then plan...teach and then plan....seems like a dream! It may be the only way soon that teachers will be able to withstand the stresses of urban education. I like to see developers of curriculum in action, not deliverers of curriculum. That's the way " I was trained up!"