Teachers in the district currently have two periods per every four days where educators can meet with their colleagues.
In the time since the Lenape Regional High School District switched to its new bell schedule at the beginning of the 2015–2016 school year, district officials say students haven’t been the only ones to benefit from the change.
At the district’s recent board of education meeting, officials spoke to how teachers have benefited from the schedule as well, particularly from what officials refer to as “common planning time” for educators.
In addition to the more commonly known changes from the district’s old bell schedule, such as students now attending each of their classes only three times per every four-day rotation, another feature is every educator of the same department at a school now has time during the week where they’re all free during the same period.
With the schedule, teachers in the district have two periods per every four days where they can meet with their colleagues for up to 57 minutes.
Those free periods also extend across the district, so if a school only has one or two teachers per building who teach a specific subject, such as world language, those teachers can still meet with their counterparts from other schools in the district.
As Cherokee High School North Principal Donna Charlesworth explained, teachers could use their meetings to collaborate, plan, collect and analyze data, create projects and assessments and participate in collegial dialogue with one another.
By using their common planning time as a form of consistent, ongoing professional development, Charlesworth said teachers are able to share what works well in their classrooms and what is well received by their students.
“Teachers in the Lenape Regional High School District get this much-needed time,” Charlesworth said. “Teachers need to be empowered. They need to be treated like the experts they are in the classroom. They are the instructional leaders … they know their needs, they know their curriculum and, most importantly, they know their students.”
Seneca High School Principal Jeff Spector highlighted some specific programs and initiatives that stemmed from the weekly planning meetings.
At Lenape High School for example, Spector said some teachers used their common time to design a plan where they would videotape themselves complimenting students to play during school television broadcasts to increase morale, and senior English teachers were able to create rubrics that students could use to guide essays they were writing for the college application process.
“It’s possible the teachers never would have had the time to do that without the common planning time,” Spector said.
Throughout all schools in the district, Charlesworth said common planning time and the professional development opportunities it affords help building strong working relationships among educators, which must be continually nurtured, cultured and promoted.
“What we know is that teachers need, as every professional needs, continual professional development,” Charlesworth said. “Professional development is intense, it’s ongoing and it has a very practical aspect to it with a focus specifically geared toward student learning.”
