How to: Setup Professional development time in your teachers' timetables

How to: Setup Professional development time in your teachers' timetables

Preamble

Teaching quality has been shown to be the single biggest factor influencing student outcomes.  Working together, teachers can have great impact on each other's practice, lifting student performance.  At other times more formal education may be required to lift teacher practice to new levels.  This guide will help you use E10 to orchestrate your desired arrangement for professional development, having the timetable structure inform the conversations you want teachers to have, or allowing the structure to gather teachers together at certain times, free of other commitments.

Types of professional development

Will your teachers work together, observing each other's practice through lesson study, teaching in teams, coming together as a community of practice? Or will they be involved in external professional development?  Perhaps your needs are a blend of both of these, and in such cases the ideas from each section below may be relevant.

Teachers learning from each other

The best professional development happens as close as possible to the classroom, with teachers sharing practice and learning empirically.  There are many ways you can build year-level structures, with team teaching, two-teachers-at-once setups and anchor classes to bring groups of students and teachers together as often as needed.

Team teaching

In Classes > Class data (F6), the Link column can be used to draw classes together.  In the example below, 7A and 7B Maths will be scheduled at the same time.  Schedule in a larger room for team teaching to occur, or room in nearby areas to enable flexible groupings of students, based on readiness to learn the concepts under study, interest or mixed ability.

For files using Curriculum Plan,   THIS IS THE NEXT STEP.

Two teachers at once

Many schools don't consider succession when they're timetabling, but bringing an aspiring teacher in contact with an experienced teacher can help build-in the routine spread of pedagogical content knowledge to support successful succession in your faculties' courses.  E10 can have two teachers on a class for this purpose, either by pre-planning such class shadowing, or backfilling an aspiring teacher's load with a number of periods of shadowing.

In the example below showing the Year 11 Classes > Class data table, 11 Physics has been configured to have two teachers at once, with teacher BWI shadowing teacher AEL for all sessions..  Right-click in the class code field, select Manage subclasses, and configure for two teachers at once.  Set the teacher in the TeacherPref field, and select Only to assign them the class.  

(Files using Curriculum Plan won't see the Line or Link columns)

In this example, 12 Theatre Studies has been configured to have a second teacher, but only for three periods, not the full seven periods.  These can be scheduled during timetable construction automatically, or manually placed by you if the shadowing decision was made post-construction.

(Files using Curriculum Plan won't see the Line or Link columns)

Bringing teachers and students together for a common period using anchor classes

If you only wanted a group of classes to come together for a common period, where teachers might work together to create a single shared lesson, using anchor classes is a good idea.  In the example below, three anchor classes in the Admin year level are linked by Line (ie. happening all at once), and linked up to three Year 8 English classes.  The anchor classes request a double, and the resulting timetable construction will see 8A/B/C come together for a double on one occasion, and freely float around the timetable separately for the other four periods.

For files in Line and Link mode, the Classes > Class data (F6) entries for English might look like this:

The corresponding Anchor classes in the Admin year level would look like this:

Important features of an anchor class setup are as follows:
  1. All run for the same length of time with the same spread request
  2. Each is linked up to one of the classes in the desired grouping
  3. No teachers or rooms are required; TeacherPref and RoomPref are set to None
  4. Setting Exportable to N is optional; N means this will not be exported to any administration systems in a sync

For files using Curriculum Plan, create a similar anchor class in the Admin year level, and in Curriculum Plan screen, show both Year 8 and Admin.  Right click on the first class you want to link.

Select Link vertically, and follow the instructions in the blue box; click all the required English classes to link, and click the Anchor class.  Once selected, press Enter to apply your vertical linking.  The multiyear link shows as a blue line.


Professional development external to the classroom

In addition to built-in succession planning, incidental learning or mandated team teaching as shown above, schools may want to build-in time for teachers to engage in observations of each other's classes, attend a formal online course, meet for curriculum development with an expert, and so on.  This section will show you how to build structures to enable this to occur.

How often? For how long? Who’s involved?

A key question would be when the professional development activity happens.  Is it once a week or multiple times a week, across a 6-week span or larger block of time?  Is one person involved in the activity or are multiple people involved? Is it complex, with satellite staff groupings coming together for a scheduled webinar, then meeting in subgroups afterwards on a regular basis?


As you ask yourself these questions, consider the following concepts that might be useful for your purpose.

Leaving space in timetables for professional development
There are many ways to provide room in timetables for teacher professional development ahead of school timetable construction, using unscheduled and scheduled time.

Unscheduled time

Allowances

If time needs to be given to teachers, leaving the scheduling of that time to them (ie. for an online course, professional reading, visits to local educational settings), then an allowance is the least restrictive measure.  Allowances are time given to teachers for a specific purpose (eg. Professional Reading 60 mins weekly).  E10 includes the Allowance time in a teacher’s allocation, ensuring they are not overloaded when the program automatically allocates teachers to classes.


Visit Teachers > Allowances to set time in teachers' schedules.  In the example below, 60 minutes has been built into teacher RJU's load. Note that an allowance can apply for the whole year, or for a specified rotation or rotations.  A View menu option allows timetablers to enter allowance loads by minutes or periods.



Scheduled time

Meetings

If time during the school day is needed, and one or more teachers will meet at the same time, then a Meeting might be more appropriate.  A meeting can easily be created for one or more teachers, and hard-coded to a specific time in the week.  Construction in the master grid will work around this hard coded meeting when you're building the timetable.


In the example below, a one period meeting has been created for four Maths teachers to develop their understanding of Mathematical Modelling.  Visit Classes > Class data for the Meetings year level to create this entry.  Notice that the Periods column is blank; E10 can schedule this at the best available time for those teachers, either during timetable construction, or (if you didn't want this entry to limit the solution for the rest of the school) after you are satisfied that student classes have a great timetabled solution.  Use the Periods column if you know exactly when this meeting is to occur.



Preparation, Planning and Assessment time (PPA) and Preferred unavailability

Preferred unavailability refers to times where teachers are available (ie. not during a part-time day off), but would prefer to be kept free.  Preferred unavailability is considered as the timetable is built, with E10 attempting to keep classes away from these periods.  


Once the timetable is built, E10's powerful PPA Roster capability can encourage or discourage PPA to be placed during a teacher’s preferred unavailable time.




School leaders are able to encourage grouping of teachers as follows:

  • Split class (eg. Year 12 and 13 teachers)

  • Faculties they are connected to (eg. Maths teachers), 

  • Courses (eg. Grade 7 Maths teachers)

  • Home/Class group (eg. 8J’s teachers)

  • Houses (eg. Red house teachers)



Complex setups of teacher meetings

Scheduled course with offline group study

Perhaps you have a group of teachers engaged in a path of formal study, with a regularly occurring webinar for two hours on Wednesday morning, plus three other sessions given to the group to meet on assignment work at any given time.  Use a single Meeting to bring the group together for four Wednesday morning sessions in a two-week timetable (WedA1, WedA2, WedB1, WedB2), with the Periods column used to hard-code just the Wednesday sessions, leaving the other three to find their best place in the timetable.




If the offline component is to be undertaken individually at times each teacher finds best, reduce the meeting to the four scheduled periods, and include a three period Allowance for teachers ATU and SPA, as described above.

Scheduled course for groups of teachers, with each group meeting independently afterwards

Consider a complex professional development requirement, where you might have a scheduled component for a number of groups of teachers.  Afterwards, time is given to subgroups to meet together to determine the implementation of the new learning in their context.  Using the Meetings idea above, create separate meetings for each group, then specify the single period they're to meet together.  The other three periods are free to fit best into each group's timetables, without tying the timetable down for 10 teachers (in the example below) at the same time.




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