Welcome to Week 13. Four day school week this week and next week. Most students seem to like four-day weeks. It’s nice having three and sometimes four-day weekends. Businesses are exploring four-day work weeks where the day is longer (10 hours), but you come into work four instead of five days. How would you feel about longer school days but only four a week instead of five? (AND Why/Why NOT)
I worked with a company that briefly experimented with doing 10-hour days, four days a week. I don’t think that it worked out because what management was trying to accomplish (maintaining a specific level of productivity per hour and stretching troubleshooting coverage) didn’t mesh with what the workers/technicians focused on (a longer weekend). Add the need for schedulers and facilities personnel having to coordinate all of the different groups and persons needed to be available to work together. I don’t think that the attempt was successful.
In education we may have a larger cultural problem of how any given day is organized and what works best for which grade levels. It’s not as if 40-hours a week is a magical number that results in the best learning outcomes. First of all, I don’t know any teachers who only work when at school and only from whatever hours they “clock in” until they drive home. And really, as an institution for learning shouldn’t the focus not be on hours-in-seats, but how best to enable learning when butts are in seats. A 10-hour student day just doesn’t seem right and on the surface feels like lots of “filler” time. 20- to 30-minutes of focused work with five-minute breaks in-between seems to be supported by research. How you organize the day beyond that should be geared toward student learning and not based on when buses are available to take students home or other infrastructure constraints.
We experimented with all kinds of different schedules during the work-from-home/emergency education times. I understand that 180 days are required by most states, but there has to be a more effective way of doing things than the one-size-fits-all industrial model still being practiced by every educational institution. While we are talking about schedules, why are we still having pre-teens and teens come to school at 7am, if not earlier. Again, sleep research has shown that this is damaging to the students and not conduce to their learning. Anyway, there has got to be a better way that works for more people than how things are currently being done. What do I know, I’ll be doing something else in another 31-school days.
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I worked with a company that briefly experimented with doing 10-hour days, four days a week. I don’t think that it worked out because what management was trying to accomplish (maintaining a specific level of productivity per hour and stretching troubleshooting coverage) didn’t mesh with what the workers/technicians focused on (a longer weekend). Add the need for schedulers and facilities personnel having to coordinate all of the different groups and persons needed to be available to work together. I don’t think that the attempt was successful.
In education we may have a larger cultural problem of how any given day is organized and what works best for which grade levels. It’s not as if 40-hours a week is a magical number that results in the best learning outcomes. First of all, I don’t know any teachers who only work when at school and only from whatever hours they “clock in” until they drive home. And really, as an institution for learning shouldn’t the focus not be on hours-in-seats, but how best to enable learning when butts are in seats. A 10-hour student day just doesn’t seem right and on the surface feels like lots of “filler” time. 20- to 30-minutes of focused work with five-minute breaks in-between seems to be supported by research. How you organize the day beyond that should be geared toward student learning and not based on when buses are available to take students home or other infrastructure constraints.
We experimented with all kinds of different schedules during the work-from-home/emergency education times. I understand that 180 days are required by most states, but there has to be a more effective way of doing things than the one-size-fits-all industrial model still being practiced by every educational institution. While we are talking about schedules, why are we still having pre-teens and teens come to school at 7am, if not earlier. Again, sleep research has shown that this is damaging to the students and not conduce to their learning. Anyway, there has got to be a better way that works for more people than how things are currently being done. What do I know, I’ll be doing something else in another 31-school days.