It’s About Time

I’ve worked with many schools, through countless meetings in an attempt to make teaching more student-centered, more student-driven, and more aligned to developmental psychology and neuroscience. Every single one of those treats the schedule of the day, semester, or year as an immovable constraint. But what if it could change?

The master schedule has a significant impact on the pedagogy of a school. It decides when learning happens, how long a topic gets, what is allowed to interrupt learning, and which ages are asked to do their cognitive exercise at which time of day. And, truthfully, most school just stick to the way scheduling has been done, which is by not thinking about learning at all. They are usually built around bus routes, staffing constraints, and the shape of last year’s schedule. That’s how elementary schools so often end up serving lunch to 11 year olds at 10:30 in the morning.

We treat time as the fixed constraint and learning as the thing that has to flex to fit inside those boxes. That’s backwards.

We don’t talk about it, but the schedule you choose is already making pedagogical claims, whether they’re explicit or not.

A 47-minute period claims that 47 minutes is a meaningful unit of teaching and learning. A 7:25am first bell in secondary school claims that adolescent brains are ready to think at 7:25am. A 90-minute daily literacy block claims that more consecutive, singularly focused minutes on a content area produces more learning. Counting seat time claims that presence can be understood as a proxy for learning.

Nobody says these claims out loud, but they’re embedded in the structure of every day, which means they get reinforced every day and treated as constant — as unchangeable. The schedule is an instructional choice that never gets reviewed.

So let’s take a look at the most egregious errors, one in secondary grades, the other in primary grades.

Around puberty, a human’s circadian rhythm shifts. Melatonin release moves later, which means adolescents genuinely cannot fall asleep as early as they used to (or as early as they will in adulthood). We all know the teenager who’s up until who-knows-when and is a groggy sleepwalker on their way to first period.

Research established this shift in the adolescent sleep system decades ago. This is a biological phase delay, not an issue of discipline or disobedience. A teenager awake at 11pm is not choosing to text with friends instead of sleeping, they’re listening to their body.

Now put that biology next to the schedule. Many American high schools start before 8am, some before 7:30. This has started to change in some places, but the latest start time I’ve seen is 9:30am. Given the natural circadian rhythm shift in this age group, we’ve designed the first 2-3 hours of school to be when their bodies are still (for all intents and purposes) asleep. We “decided” to give the earliest start times in the system to the age group whose biology is least suited to learn early in the morning. Elementary students, who wake naturally earlier, often start later. That’s backwards.

The evidence on fixing it is promising too. When districts move high school start times later, students actually sleep more. The Seattle study that tracked students with wrist monitors found roughly half an hour of added nightly sleep after the district moved start times. Sleep, mood, and attendance effects are consistent across studies, and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends secondary schools start no earlier than 8:30am and that’s probably conservative.

So why don’t more districts move? Because the start time isn’t really about learning. It’s about the schedule. It’s about bus routes, athletic schedules, and parent work hours. We can’t change the schedule because we have a schedule to maintain. That’s backwards.

When we take a look at elementary schedules, the issue is less about misalignment to biological factors of learner readiness, but more about constructing false walls — holding content areas as discrete and independent for the sake of a perceived structure to the day. Elementary classrooms are built on long, rigid content blocks. Students HAVE TO have a ninety minute literacy block every day. Then, after lunch we’ll teach a 47-minute math block followed by either science or social studies, which we will alternate because there’s just too much to cover. These blocks are uninterrupted, protected, and (of course) mandatory, all in the name of rigor. Did you see last year’s reading scores?

The logic feels good: reading matters most, so give it the biggest continuous chunk of time, then comes math and, well science and social studies get in where they fit in. But two findings I’ve talked about before suggest this is not the best route.

Distributed practice. The spacing research is one of the most consistent findings in cognitive science: the same number of minutes produces more durable learning when it’s spread out than when it’s massed together. The long daily block optimizes for coverage and for the schedule’s tidiness, not for learning or retention.

Attention development. A seven-year-old’s capacity for sustained, top-down attention runs out well before minute ninety. Past that point, you’re not getting 90 minutes of literacy learning. You’re getting maybe 25 solid minutes, followed by a long tail of management, redirection, and compliance theater. The block looks rigorous on the master schedule, but it’s aesthetic. Inside the room, a lot of it is friction.

Further, instead of starting with what students have to know (often for the test), what if we started with things they were curious about? I observed a first grade classroom in which many students were interested in art. They learned about Claude Monet and, when I visited, clearly and concisely described to me what made a painting an impressionist painting. They also used the year Monet was born and the year he died to calculate his age when he died. They studied primary and secondary colors in the context of creating their own impressionist paintings. The content was embedded in relevance, not delivered as some discrete skill or fact they’ll need to use in some undefined future — they learned it when they needed to use it, the purpose of the learning never more evident.

The thing is, schedules are built for goals that have nothing to do with optimizing for learning and or learners. Then, we spend so much time inside the schedule, that we forget that it can be altered if it no longer suits our goals. I’m reminded of the parable from David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water: As two young fish swim by an older fish headed the other direction, the old fish says, “Hey boys! how’s the water?” The young fish keep swimming, then one turns to the other and says, “What’s water?” It’s difficult to see the constraints we are immersed in as arbitrary.

The truth is, bus contracts favor staggered arrivals, so somebody has to start at 7:20. Accountability pressure favors visible, countable commitments, so literacy gets a 90-minute block you can comply with. These are all reasonable solutions to real problems, but my claim is that we are solving for the wrong problems. How best to support student learning needs to be the first problem we solve for. Everything else fits into that contstraint.

Changing schedules is much easier to write about than to actually do — there are many moving pieces and the schedule is load-bearing for so many adult systems. But there’s a difference between a hard change and an unexamined one, and most schedules are the latter.

So here’s the first step: Take your master schedule and interrogate it the way you’d interrogate a curriculum:

What belief about learning does each structure signal? Would anyone defend that belief in a faculty meeting if you said it out loud? Which structures exist for learning reasons, and which exist for logistics that we’ve stopped noticing? And when students struggle predictably at certain times or in certain blocks, is there a schedule change you could make to relieve those struggles?

You won’t be able to fix everything, for sure, but you’ll build awareness about what the schedule is really doing and where you can shift things to better support teaching and learning.

Time is a learning resource and instructional lever, but instead of using it to our advantage, we treat it as the constraint that teaching and learning must accommodate. We got it backwards.