Reimagining the School Day

Vidya Sethuraman
India Post News Service

Ethnic Minority Media (EMS) invited three education experts on April 4th to discuss optimizing the current classroom settings.  For over a century the basic structure of the school day and week has been organized around 6 or 7 periods a day, five days a week, with each period lasting 40-60 minutes. But a growing number of educators are rethinking how to restructure the school day to make schools more rewarding for students whose learning styles don’t always match the division of learning into hourly bites. The need to rethink the basic structure of the school day is receiving bipartisan support.

Shalonda Gregory, Principal of MidWest High in Oakland, CA., which is implementing a model to create innovative learning environments developed by Big Picture Learning said that students will go out on campus for internships two days a week, that is, every Tuesday and Thursday. Internships help them acquire the skills they need in the workplace to be successful in their future careers. Some high school students even get job offers during their internships. She believes that schools should be places where students feel happy. In daily teaching, understand students’ future career ideals, connect their career aspirations with classroom knowledge, and encourage them to work hard to pursue their dreams and achieve career goals.

Louis Freedberg, a long-time education journalist and former Editor of EdSource who is now Executive Producer of Sparking Equity, a podcast tracking education reforms, analyzed that the current classroom mechanism is not suitable for everyone. He said that each child’s learning pace is inconsistent and they learn at different speeds. Such a uniform classroom arrangement is not suitable for everyone. He said that during the three years of the epidemic, physical classes were not possible, which made many children want to resume classes as soon as possible. However, in the first year when physical classes resumed after the epidemic, students’ scores hit a record low, and they have only gradually improved in the past year. This shows that the current classroom system arrangements need to be improved.

Louis Freedberg introduced the concept of Carnegie Unit, also known as effective credit unit (credit unit), which refers to the length of time students actually study a course in school. Generally speaking, students need 120 hours of class time per year. Louis Freedberg said that current education needs to improve efficiency. In addition to book knowledge, children should be given key skills for future work, including critical thinking, teamwork, and the ability to study alone.