Banking Time
At many schools, teachers touch base in the hallways, at lunch, or after school, but they do not have meaningful time during their workday to share classroom problems and compare instructional notes. To improve professional development, school staff at California’s Martin Luther King Elementary School in El Centro, created a schedule that provides them with regular time each week for grade-level meetings, whole-staff professional development, and teacher study groups. They created this opportunity by "banking" time -- adding instructional minutes to each day, so that every Thursday morning the students come to school one hour later.
The extra hour has allowed staff to participate together in training on key schoolwide goals such as learning how to better use student performance data to improve teaching and learning. This formal time for collaboration was a marked change. Teachers at King cite it as one of the most powerful elements of their improvement effort. Administrative business during the collaboration time is kept to a minimum. Instead, teachers review student work, analyze data, plan lessons and receive training, mostly in grade level teams. Professional development has come to mean professional reading, dialog, and analysis of student work and data, all focused on the school goal of strengthening student literacy.
Comments from Participants
Do you have information about middle school and high schools who are banking time?
- Jan 06, 2005 8:34 AM
At our intermediate grade 7 and 8 school, time was banked until June 2003 to provide approximately 1 and 1/2 hours weekly on Wednesday's for early dismissal. New interpretations of the teacher contract resulted in this practice ending. I believe it also ended because the banked time was not seen as purposeful by many teachers who therefore felt ambiguous about the value of banked time. In August 2003 we continued with regular after-school collaboration by department, and in August 2004 we introduced interdisciplinary teams of 4 teachers that are able to collaborate daily during the school day. These teams of teachers have common groups of students (smaller learning communities) and common daily planning time. Many of us still have an appetite for longer sessions to do meaningful school-wide professional development activities throughout the school year. I hope our staff will approve the banking of 3 minutes per day to permit us to build in about 5 half day sessions during the coming 2005-2006 school year.
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Douglas
Livingston, Principal, RJ Frank Intermediate School Mar 12, 2005 11:24 AM
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