Step 1: Reflect on Current School Schedule 

The priorities a master school schedule represents, whether explicit or implicit, are critical aspects of defining how learning takes place in the school. Setting explicit priorities, and expressing their relative importance, is therefore one of the most critical steps of developing a strategic schedule. 

Click the ‘Reflect’ button to access our Strategic Scheduling Checklist. School teams can use this checklist—organized into six reflection categories—to reflect on their existing school schedule and begin to prioritize changes to improve the student and teacher experiences in their school.

Step 2: Explore Scheduling Strategies 

Designing a strategic master schedule is about prioritizing strategies and making trade-offs to maximize the resources available. As we say, you can do anything, but you can’t do everything.

When designing a school schedule, it’s important to fully explore different strategies to determine the time, staffing, and trade-offs needed to make each work.

ERS has worked with districts and individual school teams across the country to design and create school schedules that meet schools’ most important priorities within the context of their available resources. We’ve developed resources and tools to help school and district leaders pressure-test different strategies, model the cost implications, and select the ones that best fit their needs. 

Resources to explore:

• Power Strategies: five strategies to focus your investments and planning on that will address critical student needs now and lay a sustainable foundation for lasting improvement.
• How-to Guides for Implementing Strategic School Redesign: nine guides for how to organize resources with a “Do Now, Build Toward” mindset in key focus areas such as tutoring, credit recovery, professional learning and collaboration, and more.
• New Teacher Toolkit: This toolkit helps school systems provide new teachers the support they need—and information on how to reorganize the resources to do it.
• Finding Time for Collaborative Planning: This brief provides context on how American teachers currently spend their time and offers practical strategies for how principals can create more collaborative planning time.

Step 3: Design a Strategic Schedule 

Once school teams reflect on their priorities and explore options for how to design their school schedule to accomplish those priorities, it’s time to start designing the schedule.

Click on the links below to access our staffing and scheduling tools and begin the schedule design process. Also see our elementary school schedule design tool that we use in consult with school and district teams. To learn more how ERS works with school and system leaders to design strategic schedules, click the ‘Support’ tab.

Resources to Explore:

• Secondary School Staffing Tool: a step-by-step tool to support district leaders construction their school’s secondary schedule. 
• Finding Time for Collaborative Planning: a brief that provides context on how American teachers currently spend their time and offers practical strategies for how principals can create more collaborative planning time.