Mastering the Schedule and Enhancing Your Role as the Principal (High School)

Every year, I start my school's next year scheduling in early October.  Many people ask me why I start so early, but it is my experience that this is the best way to build staff capacity and maximize student scheduling. I believe that the school scheduling should be a collaborative process; however, it takes about 3 or 4 cycles for teacher/staff to really understand the choices that they are or are not making.  These 3 to 4 cycles need to be long because the greater the understanding, the more input the staff will want to give.

I have been an administrator for 6 years - only one year have I started without all of my schedules being in order on the first day - the first year that I was an assistant principal.  This happened mostly because I was new to my role and didn't fully understand the scheduling process; I just left it to the scheduler who I assumed would be able to take care of everything.

The problem with this is:

1.  Scheduling reflects your academic priorities and planning - it is the ground floor of any student intervention (pullouts everyone?).  Your scheduler may make decisions on ease, not based on what's best for students, the teachers, and/or the school.

2.  Scheduling impacts both the principal's and the staff's workload and collaboration, and, therefore, the quality of instruction.

3.  Scheduling impacts the culture and climate of your school: attendance, discipline, and academic press can all be impacted by a poorly designed master schedule.  You may also find your leadership undermined by   scheduling as well if teachers can pander and negotiate schedules and room assignments that you aren't assigning.

Principals should not be afraid of scheduling; sit with your programmer as they go through the scheduling process, so you can learn each step and figure out how to maximize your schedule.  This is how I learned to schedule and to lead in the development of my schedule.

Basic considerations:

1.  Complete your course tallies (counts of courses that student select) BEFORE budgeting occurs.  This means that you will know how many teachers and what types of certifications you will need.  You don't have to do this yourself - the scheduler can share this report with you and walk you through it.

 It will help you maximize your teacher certification selections. You will also ensure that your schedule is funded, and you aren't surprised by salaries.  Accordingly, if you have to scramble for funds it will be for 20 thousand dollars worth of office supplies instead of a 90 thousand dollar English teacher.

2.   Identify collaboration time that you want to occur during the school day.  If your district has principal directed periods this will maximize your impact on instruction and give you time to provide professional development and support to teachers during the school day.  Create a prioritized list - most schedules can handle one or two types of collaboration time - once you get beyond this, you may run into trouble with getting all members of teams scheduled for the particular period.

The first part of creating schedules is to lay out the blocks of when classes will occur and what rooms they are in.  If you tell your scheduler this AFTER the master is set, the scheduler will have to re-build the schedule before they can schedule students.

NOTE: Also let the scheduler know if you want teachers freed for a certain number of periods and which periods those are

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3.  Pay attention to workload, room assignments, and hallway assignments.  This can improve the culture and climate of your school.  

a.  My rule of thumb is no more than 2 preps per teacher - it is hard to be effective with too many preps and/or too many room assignments - the goal is one room, but if there have to be multiple rooms, they need to be close to each other

 b.  Look at what teachers are assigned to what rooms; those hidden corners go to my most proactive teachers with the best classroom management.  Teachers who need support are in the middle, so they get additional support from other teachers and security.  You may also consider grouping teachers by departments to foster collaboration and peer observation or grade levels for the same reasons AND to strengthen security for students.

c. Hallway assignments are important to maximize your security - combined with locker assignments, you   can enhance security by creating target areas at certain periods and minimize student crowding

There is definitely more to scheduling than just these few points; I know that there are some master schedulers out there who are principals, and they probably have some basics to share as well.  What are yours?