Schools should strike a balance between
expanded time for students to learn and
for teachers to collaborate and improve.
help seeing that hard work will be
rewarded with success and that delaying
gratification and pursuing long-term
goals are necessary.
Many teachers believe that with more
time, they could succeed with far more
struggling students. Expanded learning
time enables students to do more of that
hard work together and with teacher
supervision—as opposed to the solo
nature of homework—and allows more
intentional efforts to build school
community culture and values.
Not Solely Sufficient
If adding time alone were sufficient,
every expanded learning time school
would be a great success. But not every
expanded school succeeds. Experience
shows that a cluster of related school
reforms needs to happen to enable the
sort of performance one sees at Edwards
Middle School or a high-performing
KIPP school. At least three other drivers
are key to success.
First, schools need high levels of human
capital or, in plainer language, a strong
principal and highly effective teachers.
The process of planning for and implementing a redesign around more time is
an extraordinary leadership opportunity
for a principal who is a true instructional
leader. Well-led schools can recruit and
train excellent teachers and hone the
skills of all incumbent teachers by using
fair evaluation systems to ensure high
standards.
Second, schools need to use data-
driven instructional approaches. Although
most schools in the United States might
claim they use such approaches, this has
not been our experience. Managing indi-
vidual students’ instruction on the basis
of objective measures of their progress
while using broader data to drive the
discussion of how to improve enables
school faculty to use added time most
effectively.
use the resources of people, time, and
money. For example, to what extent can
we use staggered start times for teachers
and community-based organizations?
Although many of the most successful
schools have all teachers at work for all
of the expanded schedule, it may be
more cost effective and broadly applicable to find ways to vary the approach.
The challenge will be to use the wave
of resources from federal ARRA funding
to launch thoughtful, well-targeted
expanded learning time efforts. We need
to understand how to use more learning
time well to ensure that the U.S. ideal
of equal opportunity for all through
excellent public education becomes
the norm—and not the celebrated
exception. EL
References
Blackwell, L., Trzesniewski, K., & Dweck,
C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an
adolescent transition: A longitudinal study
and an intervention. Child Development,
78( 1), 246-263.
Dobbie, W., & Fryer, R. G. (2009). Are high-quality schools enough to close the achievement gap? Evidence from a bold social experiment in Harlem (Working Paper No.
15473). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau
of Economic Research.
Farbman, D. A. (2009). Tracking an emerging
movement: A report on expanded time schools
in America. Boston: National Center on
Time and Learning. Available: www.time
andlearning.org/images/12.7.09FinalData
baseReport.pdf
Hoxby, C. M., Murarka, S., & Kang, J.
(2009). How New York City’s charter schools
affect achievement. Cambridge, MA: New
York City Charter Schools Evaluation
Project.
Where We Go From Here
The movement to match learning time
to student needs is still in the early
stages of development. We need to dig
down into the specific classroom practices that expanded time enables and
figure out which ones are the most effective and which ones we can most readily
scale up. We need to learn how to better
Chris Gabrieli is Chairman of the
National Center on Time and Learning
( www.timeandlearning.org); Adjunct
Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School
of Education; and coauthor, with Warren
Goldstein, of Time to Learn: How a New
School Schedule Is Making Smarter Kids,
Happier Parents, and Safer Neighborhoods (Jossey-Bass, 2008); chris@time
andlearning.org.
