Every year school boards consider the school calendar for the next school year. Setting the annual calendar is not only a statutory responsibility of a board but a very real statement of how the board views the provision of instruction to children. The calendar sets the architectural structure of schooling.
Deep into the pandemic, the 2022-23 calendar also reflects what a school board has learned about its community and 21st century children. Without argument, pandemic schooling will influence post-pandemic schooling for years to come. Children, teachers, parents, and community are approaching 4K-12 education differently on the backside of their remote, virtual, and hybrid school experiences.
A first question in this consideration should be “does a traditional calendar of 36 consecutive weeks of teaching and learning interspersed with traditional holidays provide the best teaching and learning calendar?”.
The traditional calendar is derived from our agrarian/industrial history. The agrarian context is that children are available for school between the fall harvest and spring farming seasons. School began late in September and ended late in May. Consequently, a school calendar is compacted to keep the summer months free of school. In our state, tourism has replaced farming as the driver for a compact calendar. Working-aged children provide the “grunt” labor for tourism. The key element of the agrarian calendar is availability – children are available for schooling when they are not working.
The industrial context is the five-days a week assembly line of teaching and learning. Get all of the age-eligible children in the schoolhouse, disperse them in a hierarchy of grade levels and academic courses and annually push them to the next level until the graduate. Begin teaching the approved curriculum on day one, teach it in consecutive weeks and days and finish learning nine months later. The key element of the industrial calendar is daycare – children are in school so that adults are available for employment.
Public school shadowed the collegiate model of a two semester and four quarter block of 36 weeks of school or the amount of time required to teach one Carnegie unit of academic credit. The test case in the early 1900s was a college course Biology – compacted into two semesters of 18 weeks each. Voila! Our national educational leaders wanted high school to prep for college, so the college semesters because high school semesters and have been ever since. The key element of the collegiate calendar is teaching time – a course can be taught (not necessarily learned) in semester blocks.
School boards have mandated a traditional, annual calendar based upon agrarian, industrial and collegiate models for more 100 years. With such repetition this is the fallback calendar that most school boards first consider when they discuss a calendar for the next school year. It also is the calendar that most adults in the community relate to, expect, and accept for the education of their children.
The most common rationale for why schools do what schools do is – that’s what school was like when I was a student.
The easiest action a board can take is to adjust the 180 days for interrupting holidays, place the first day of instruction on or after September 1, and vote to approve. The most contentious discussion will be on the placement of spring break – when and how many days. Finis.
But, does it provide the best teaching and learning architecture? No. Every school faculty, administration, and board has learned new things from our pandemic experience and a 1900s school calendar is archaic.
The second question in the board’s consideration of the next year’s calendar is “will we change the calendar using what we have learned?”. It takes a lot of will power to move the status quo toward something new.
What have we learned?
The pandemic taught us the prioritized value of school in our community is this: school = day care. Parents and employers are going ballistic when children are quarantined at home due to covid. Remote education did not necessarily fail as an instructional delivery system. It failed because adults at home were not able to support learning at home. A child at home interrupts work routines. Our economy accepts the agrarian/industrial model of nine months of school and three months of summer of children available for seasonal employment. Employed parents have learned to work with the traditional calendar and do not like/want changes in the calendar the school publishes at the start of the school year.
We learned that parents and the community want their school to publicize an annual calendar parents and the community can count on. Cancelling any calendared school day is problematic.
The pandemic is teaching us that the social-emotional or mental health development of children is a new priority. The acculturation of children requires them to be in personal contact with each other. Without daily school attendance, children become unruly, self-centered, and asocial. Checking the school discipline reports after children returned to daily attendance is confirming these three characteristics.
Parents want their schools to fix the pandemic-bred social-emotional problems children are exhibiting.
The problem is in the arithmetic. If it takes 36 weeks to teach a standardized curriculum in our 4K-12 instructional ladders, when will schools address social-emotional and mental health issues? If we keep to the traditional calendar, some things will have to give.
Third, despite all optimistic reports, pandemic children are displaying gaps of missed and incomplete learning. Early reading proficiencies require the personal attention of trained teachers. Mathematical thinking, especially in the transitional years of fractions into Algebra requires constant conversation between teacher and child to assure accurate understanding and application of algebraic foundations. On-line foreign language instruction is exceptionally difficult with the consistent and constant modeling of a teacher. A child may have learned to blow into a trumpet while at home, but without the careful and constant modeling of a teacher in how to modulate breath, sound does not become music.
The pandemic caused missed and incomplete student learning. It will take several years to make pandemic children complete in their curricular education.
The sorting out of individual student needs as we work to make all children complete in their learning takes time for assessment and planning as well as more time for individual and small group work. The same remedial plan is not needed nor appropriate for grade levels of children. Some children suffer more missed and incomplete learning than others. Children with exceptionalities, children in poverty without reliable Internet, and children without strong home learning supports for remote learning missed more essential learning and have more incomplete learning. Individual attention is required to understand the wide variety of learning needs, planning and delivery of individual learning is required, and these take time. Time is what the school calendar delivers.
We require a hybrid calendar that meets our community’s traditional demands and completes our children’s educational needs.
The first step in creating a hybrid calendar is to address the length of the teacher’s annual contract. The traditional contract shadowed the school calendar – 180 days plus paid vacation/holidays plus clerical/preparation days – made the contracted year 185+ days. A contract of 185 – 190 days is not enough time for teachers to do the work we now require for the complete education of all children.
The contract must be expanded to encompass the work required in the new calendar.
Teachers need adequate time in front of the school year to evaluate the learning needs of each of the children in their assignment. Generalizations about readiness for the next grade level or course not longer hold true. The new generalization is – each child needs to be evaluated for readiness to learn and an individual learning plan needs to be devised for each child. For example, most children promoted to second grade in SY 22-23 will have learned more than half of their first grade curriculum, but second grade will need to make all children secure in their first grade learning before or while teaching all children their second grade curriculum. If not, children will need to return to first grade. And, that is not going to fly with children or parents.
The social-emotional and mental health issues need to be melded into start of the school year routines and implemented throughout the school year.
Best teaching practices provide initial instruction, assess the success of initial learning, evaluate the need to adjust instruction for clarification, correction and extension, followed by continuing instruction informed by adjustments, and completion of the instructional unit with final assessments of learning. This is the model the WI DPI is insisting upon in its re-certification of teacher preparation programs in our state. The model requires time for careful assessment, evaluation of assessment data, and planning for instructional adjustments. This model should be in the hybrid calendar. And repeated several time during the school year.
Children in the post-pandemic need a school calendar that is based upon what we have learned from the pandemic experience and the best instructional practices we know for completing their ongoing education. This calendar will move the status quo for future school calendaring.
A hybrid calendar based upon our pandemic learning and best practices looks like this.
Teachers have two weeks prior to September 1 to assess student readiness and needs and plan a first unit of instruction built around individual student plans. Teachers have the full array of student assessment data and time to make data-informed instructional plans for the children they will teach.
School starts on September 1 or first day after if the first is a weekend day.
The first unit of instruction plus social-emotional and mental health inclusions will be completed in five weeks. Add to the time required for the first unit the time needed for the school’s annual fall assessments. At the end of the sixth week of school insert a week of no school for children. During this week, schedule
- time for teachers to assess student learning of the first unit and make informed adjustments in their planning for second and subsequent units of instruction,
- parent teacher conferences to share teacher observations about student learning and plans for addressed learning needs in the next months of school, and
- mental health/school stress relief for children, teachers, and families.
The A, B, and Cs of the hybrid calendar are essential. The repetition of past instructional practices will not on their own remedy the dilemma of missed and incomplete pandemic student learning. A more clinical approach is required. The A, B, Cs are that clinical approach.
A) makes “plan your work and work your plan” specific in scope and exact outcomes. Success in the first unit of learning sets a child’s pattern for the year. Success begets success; why would we do it any other way? Well, we do in the traditional calendar that moves from one unit to the next without examination. “She will do better in the next unit” and “If he didn’t learn it in that unit, we’ll circle back in the next units and he will do better” are recognition of failure. We need to stop that traditional approach.
B) ensures time for a clinical review of student learning and examination of successes and needs. The traditional expectation that teachers do this kind of review of a unit’s instruction in the evening after school or on a weekend in the traditional school calendar was fully unrealistic and a generalized failure. The second part of B) is a very detailed parent conferencing on student successes and needs. The conference includes the assessment of the first unit and reports from the fall assessments. Parent conferencing here is not the showtime of an open house, but the sharing of clinical data. This work takes time and time must be provided.
C)is the assurance that school deliberately puts stress relief into the school calendar. For some parents, this time off from school is the time for medical and dental visits. For some, it is the time children to be friends outside of the school day and restraints of adult-driven weekends.
The hybrid calendar will remove all the single days of no school that range through the school calendar for teacher PD, clerical, and conferencing, and will eliminate two- and three-day weeks around the holidays.
All weeks will be five school-day weeks, excepting Memorial Day week. The entire week of Thanksgiving will be no school days, the odd days preceding Christmas and after New Years will he rounded into complete weeks of vacation, and spring break will be one week scheduled between instructional units.
The hybrid calendar will require more days to complete than the traditional calendar. As September 1 is non-negotiable as a start date, the last day of a hybrid school calendar will be in the third or fourth week of June. For the community needing child labor in the summer, working age children will be available for the heart of the season – July 4 to September 1.
This is a pandemic-informed and best practices-based school calendar. The education of all children is the priority not the time available for their schooling or daycare. Teachers are given the time needed to plan, teach, adjust, and clarify/correct learning at the time of learning instead of at the end of a semester or school year. It is a repeatable calendar.
School boards must learn that school calendaring based upon the agrarian, industrial, collegiate models does not meet our contemporary post-pandemic and teaching and learning requirements. New thinking about school calendaring is required.