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Time Matters

NCTL E-Newsletter: April 2010

President’s Letter

The National Center on Time & Learning continues to be encouraged by the increasing number of education and policy leaders committed to redesigning the school day and year to increase learning time for students. We are particularly pleased by the Obama Administration’s inclusion of expanded time as a central strategy in it's education reform agenda. The creation of school turnaround models calling for “increased learning time” is at the heart of several ARRA grant programs and the Administration’s recently released blueprint for ESEA Reauthorization builds on the ARRA recommendations to redesign and expand the American school calendar.

Our belief in the catalytic power of expanded time is based on our experience working with schools in Massachusetts that have undergone dramatic transformation as well as the success of high-performing charter schools. Just a few years ago, Boston’s Clarence Edwards Middle School was one of the district’s lowest performing and targeted for school closure. Then, with a new principal and a newly expanded school day, a transformation unfolded. The story of how the Edwards became one of the highest performing and most desired middle schools in Boston is an inspiration.

In this edition of our E-Newsletter, we provide updates on our work across the country as well as on the federal policy landscape. In our research section, we announce the release of a revealing new report by our partner Education Resource Strategies that compares schools in six urban districts to “Leading Edge” schools that maximize time, data, and staff to improve instruction. Additionally, we explore how more time can be a critical element in enabling students to engage in higher-order thinking. We also draw your attention once again to our database report that profiles schools with expanded time. To highlight the important role community partners play in Expanded Learning Time (ELT) schools, we also feature an audio interview with the EcoTarium, a natural sciences museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, and a dynamic partner involved with three ELT schools

This continues to be an exciting time to be a part of the national movement to improve public education in America and we are pleased to have your continued support for our work.

Sincerely,




Jennifer Davis
President, National Center on Time & Learning

Federal Policy Update

NCTL continues to advocate for Expanded Learning Time across the country, working hard to leverage federal resources to ensure all children are provided a high quality and well-rounded education. In anticipation of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), NCTL and the Center for American Progress recently released a policy brief that provides an overview of the most recent research related to learning time, outlines current on-the-ground efforts across the country to expand learning time, and highlights the lessons learned from these initiatives. Congressional educational leaders have already demonstrated their support for expanding school time with the reintroduction of the TIME Act in July of last year. The TIME Act serves as an effective policy framework for expanding ELT initiatives within ESEA reauthorization. Please learn more here.

As ESEA reauthorization begins, it’s important to remember that the Expanded Learning Time model is unique and quite different from traditional afterschool programming and that they serve distinct purposes. ELT is a school improvement model where all children in targeted schools receive a stronger and expanded education in a longer school day and/or year. The ELT model is designed to not only provide expanded educational opportunities for students, but more time for teachers to spend with students and in learning communities together in order to review student progress and plan new lessons. Afterschool programs are designed to provide children enhanced learning and enrichment programming when school is not in session and often also help parents by ensuring children are in safe places while they work. Both models are needed in America today; however, we believe that high-need students require more time in school if they are going to catch up and become college and career ready by the end of high school.

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Updates from Around the Country

NCTL is currently working in five states to expand learning time and bring a more rigorous and comprehensive education to thousands of children. Our work takes two forms. First, we provide assistance to state policymakers to guide the crafting of effective policies related to time and learning. Second, we work directly with school leaders to help them leverage additional time to strengthen their educational program and hone instructional methods. In each issue of our newsletter we update you with the latest news and happenings from this work.

Alabama, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island

NCTL is currently supporting the departments of education and local districts and schools in these states as they consider how to increase learning time as part of their strategy to support chronically low performing schools. The work in these states is the product of a joint venture between NCTL and Focus on Results, an organization that has worked with schools and districts across the United States and Canada to make measurable, lasting improvements in student performance, school leadership, and decision-making. Together, NCTL and Focus on Results have created a core product for school transformation called Expanded Learning for Results (ELR) to support districts in their efforts to rapidly accelerate achievement in persistently low performing schools. ELR is a multi-year school transformation process that uses increased learning time and engages school leaders and teachers in designing and implementing a better, stronger school day.

With NCTL’s support, schools and districts in these states launched the ELR planning process earlier this year. Since then, leadership teams in all schools have participated in three successful planning sessions. These sessions have focused on how to use increased learning time to strengthen core instruction and improve teacher collaboration, as well as building a plan for the implementation of an expanded school day. Each leadership team has also been meeting with on-site c oaches who offer support and guidance throughout the planning process.

Alabama

Schools (District):

 Westlawn Middle School and Davis Hills Middle School (Huntsville)

Key Partner(s):

 Huntsville School Committee, Alabama Department of Education

Rhode Island

Schools (District):

Calcutt Middle School (Central Falls); Veazie Street Elementary and Gilbert Stuart Middle School (Providence); Citizens Memorial Elementary School (Woonsocket)

Key Partner(s):

Rhode Island Afterschool Plus Alliance (RIASPA), Rhode Island Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (RIDE), and the Governor’s Office

Oklahoma

Schools (District):

Moon Academy, Rogers Middle School, Roosevelt Middle School,and Webster Middle School (Oklahoma City); Lewis & Clark School, Gilcrease School, and Clinton School (Tulsa)

Key Partner(s):

Oklahoma City School District, Tulsa School District, and the Oklahoma State Department of Education

Massachusetts

Schools (District):

22 schools in 11 districts

Key Partner(s):

Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education

Scope of Services:

NCTL’s sister organization, Massachusetts 2020, serves as both the chief advocate to policymakers and the primary technical assistance provider to schools. Schools have expanded time by 300 hours annually with more time for academics, enrichment, and collaborative planning and professional development for teachers.

Status Update:

Massachusetts 2020 has organized and hosted 4 out of the 7 technical assistance sessions this year. Participating school teams continue to be very engaged and thoughtful in this work and schools are moving forward.

Colorado and Hawaii

NCTL is also exploring opportunities to support other states as they address the growing need to increase learning time. In Colorado, NCTL is working with the Commissioner and his senior team to design a state-wide ELT strategy. We have also had a series of discussions with district leaders about expanding the school day as part of their work to turnaround the lowest performing schools. In Hawaii, NCTL continues its work with Ho’okako’o Corporation, a state-supported education intermediary responsible for converting underperforming schools to charter school status. Ho’okako’o helped to launch one ELT school in Fall 2009 and a second school, Kualapu’u, is planning to expand its schedule next school year.

Race to the Top Winners Announced

Also, the Department of Education recently announced the Phase 1 winners of Race to the Top. Congratulations to Delaware and Tennessee! We were pleased that increased learning time factored into so many of the proposals. We are looking forward to the next round of applications that are due June 1st with winners announced in September.

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Research

New Research Tracks How Time is Spent in High School

NCTL, in partnership with Education Resource Strategies (ERS), is proud to announce the release of a new paper that documents how schools utilize time and individualize support to improve student achievement. In “Time and Attention in Urban High Schools: Lessons for School Systems,” the authors compared how six urban school districts structure high school time to nine “Leading Edge” high schools. They found that traditional school districts do not organize or use time and individual attention in strategic ways to improve instruction. Instead, the use of additional time was triggered primarily by course failure and increased individualized attention resulted almost exclusively from placement in special education. Additionally, the study illustrates how these same schools structure time in rigid blocks that do not vary in length according to subject.

Comparatively, “Leading Edge” schools, as documented in the 2009 ERS report, demonstrate several shared practices for structuring student time and individualized attention that distinguish them from traditional district schools, including:

  1. Clearly defining an instructional model that reflects the school’s vision, learning goals, and student population, and making tough trade-offs that prioritize the use of people, time, and money to support that vision.
  2. Increasing the overall amount of time students spend in school by an average of 20 percent more than local district schools.
  3. Devoting an average of 233 equivalent days more to core academics than traditional district schools, primarily by expanding core academic expectations and individual and small group academic support.
  4. Building a school schedule that strategically advances the school’s instructional model and addresses student needs.
  5. Adapting their strategies in response to lessons learned and changing student needs and conditions.

The findings from this report suggest some clear action steps that urban school leaders can take to improve time and attention practices. We look forward to continue to work with districts and schools across the country to learn from these “Leading Edge” schools and move towards implementing these promising practices.

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Research Close Up: Time and Higher-Order Thinking

A common misconception about education today is that having academic standards means that students are expected to learn only a certain number of concrete bits of knowledge (fractions, historical dates, grammar, etc.). The reality, however, is that internationally competitive standards aim to develop mastery, where students learn subject content in order to adapt and apply what they’ve learned to other contexts in order to solve problems or understand a new set of facts. Common parlance refers to this ability as “higher-order thinking” and is known as “knowledge transfer” in cognitive science.1

While there are but a few studies that directly draw the connection between time and higher-order thinking, those that pinpoint the connection are fairly clear that time acts as an important modulator in the level and effectiveness of higher-order thinking. Consider:

  • In one study, researchers arranged for a single teacher to teach a thermodynamics curriculum to four cohorts of middle schools students. Each cohort experienced an increasingly streamlined version of the curriculum, with one group learning the material across the course of 12 weeks, one in nine, one in six, and the last in three weeks. On the basis of pre- and post-tests, researchers determined that students in all four groups scored similarly on the multiple choice (i.e., factual knowledge) portion of the test. On the written section, however, where students were required to convey their conceptual grasp of the material, the 12-week group scored highest, with scores declining in proportion to the number of weeks over which the students had taken the course. Nearly seven in ten students in the 12-week group (69 percent) demonstrated conceptual knowledge, where only one quarter (25 percent) of the three-week cohort did.2
  • Another research experiment that sought to determine the optimal method of teaching high school mathematics—hypermedial, observational, self-explanation or inquiry—found time quantity to play a role as well. Specifically, the researchers discovered that the most effective teaching method, measured in terms of students’ acquisition of conceptual, procedural, and intuitive knowledge (i.e., higher-order thinking), was self-explanation. Researchers report that this method also required the most time.3
  • There have been a number of studies of classroom interactions between teachers and students where deliberate or expected pauses in conversation—either to allow for questions from students or responses to questions from teachers—have been tracked in an effort to quantify the optimal “wait time.” A review of these studies indicates that, especially in math and science classes, teachers’ wait time of at least three to five seconds has been shown to increase cognitive depth versus a shorter wait time. For one, there is evidence that teachers’ questions themselves were more likely to be better focused on querying students’ “understanding” rather than their recall, if teachers paused a little bit more before posing the question. On the other side, students’ responses tended to be lengthier and more complex if the teacher waited a few moments before calling on a student to answer.4

While these experiments certainly suggest that providing students and teachers sufficient time to think and to analyze could lead to more students achieving subject mastery, there is still much research needed to determine what constitutes “sufficient.” Even absent this more definitive rendering, however, the evidence we do have makes it clear that if students are to develop higher-order thinking skills, the school day and curriculum must be structured in a way where learning is not rushed. Our students deserve time to develop the understanding and skills they will need to be productive workers and citizens of the 21st century.

References

  1. For more information on the nature of knowledge transfer see Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L. & Cocking, R.R. (Eds.) (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. As the authors explain, “…learning cannot be rushed; the complex cognitive activity of information integration requires time.”
  2. Clark, D., & Linn, M.C. (2003). Designing for knowledge integration: The impact of instructional time. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 12(4), 451-493.
  3. Eysink, T., Berthold, K., Kolloffel, M.O. and Wouters, P. Learner performance in multimedia learning arrangements: An analysis across instructional approaches. American Educational Research Journal (December 2009), 1107-49.
  4. A thorough review of this research is found in Tobin, K. (1987). The role of wait time in higher cognitive level learning. Review of Educational Research, 57:1 (Spring), 69-95.

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New NCTL Report Profiles Schools with Expanded Time

In December, NCTL released a groundbreaking report describing the state of expanded-time schools in America. The report draws from our new national database of schools that have broken from the conventional school calendar in order to improve educational outcomes. Currently, the database contains 655 schools across 36 states serving more than 300,000 students. The database and report represent the most comprehensive attempt to define and describe this growing and much-watched field. 

Notable findings include:

  • On average these schools offer about 25 percent more time than the national norm of 180 six-hour days;
  • While a majority of the schools included are public charter schools, more than one-quarter of the schools identified are standard district public schools;
  • Compared with national averages, schools with expanded time serve a more heavily minority and poorer student population; and
  • Data suggest that more time is associated with higher academic achievement, as students in schools with an expanded school day were found on average to outperform their district peers.

Certainly, much more research is needed as this movement to redesign schools with more time unfolds, but we hope that our database and report stimulate more interest among researchers and policymakers in the need for and implications of more time in school. We were pleased that the release of the report generated a front-page story in Education Week and a column by leading education writer, Jay Mathews, in the Washington Post. We hope that the interest only increases from here!

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Time Innovator

Featured in a new report on ELT partnerships by the Center for American Progress, the EcoTarium Science Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, has adapted its role as a learning center on the natural sciences to work directly with all 350 fourth and fifth grade students in the three ELT schools in the city. Through its program, “Mission Explore: To the EcoTarium and Beyond,” the EcoTarium has developed an interdisciplinary, project-based curriculum tied to state standards that makes science exciting and relevant. The program rests on a unique collaboration between the Worcester Public Schools and the EcoTarium and includes professional development workshops for teachers, classroom visits, field study trips, and an emphasis on family engagement.

NCTL was able to catch up with two folks from the EcoTarium who are deeply involved in Mission Explore, Theresa Wolcott, museum educator, and Jennifer Kent Glick, director of marketing and development. We spoke with them to learn how their partnership with the Worcester ELT schools is positively impacting students, teachers, families and the museum itself. You can listen to the audio interview here. Please give it a few moments to load.

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In the News

Read news articles from around the country about the National Center on Time & Learning and the movement to expand learning time.

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Employment Opportunities

At this time, the National Center on Time & Learning is seeking applicants for a number of positions. Please learn more here.

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