Case Study

Setting: Avon School

After a few weeks of traveling around England and working with several schools on a short term basis, I soon focused on a few schools on a regular basis. The school I worked closest with and was most receptive to a timetable change was Avon School. Avon School is an age 11-19 coeducational comprehensive school for 1200 students. 8.6% of students are eligible for free school meals and 6.3% of students qualify as Special Education Needs.

The school was rated as Outstanding in 2010 and 2011 by the UK school inspection body, OFSTED (see Appendix C for more on OFSTED). It is led by a group of forward thinking educators who realize that they need to keep improving to keep up with the diverse needs of students in the 21st century. The teachers at Avon School, like almost all of the teachers I met in England, are passionate about their students. However, they worked extra hours to meet the demands of the English system.

During the 2012-2013 school year, I spent 20 days at Avon School. For a majority of those days, I worked with small groups of teachers to develop projects they could use in class with Year 7 and 8 students - 28 teachers in total. On other days, I spent time with teachers from the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) to work on school wide logistics, including ways to support deeper learning through projects.

One of my recommendations to the SLT was that they group students in cohorts that see fewer teachers each week. For example, each cohort would see one teacher for Math and Science (8 hours total per week) and a different teacher for English, History, and Geography (8 hours total per week). This meant that students would only see two teachers for 16 out of 30 instructional periods per week. The rest of the timetable was similar to previous years. Although the schedule is not ideal in my eyes, it is a major shift in the amount of teachers each student sees and how long each student sees each teacher.

Table 3: Year 7 Student timetable from Avon School 2013-2014

I also helped the SLT develop a plan for a Professional Development schedule where teachers would collaborate and plan projects for the week. They would meet for 45 minutes three days a week with three different meeting styles: A- all staff meetings, B- project planning time with team teachers, and C- content area meetings. Surprisingly, over 90% of the teachers I spoke with were in favor of the extra meetings if they got a chance to try Project Based Learning.

Methods for Data Collection

In July 2013, I flew back to San Diego and designed methods to collect data. I focused on two teachers who taught blocked English, History, and Geography to Year 7 and 8 students. I chose not to include Math and Science teachers for this study, because many schools that I spoke with were not in favor of blocking those classes together. Both of these teachers had worked with me the previous year and went out of their way to make themselves available for video conference interviews and follow up questions via email.

Each interview lasted approximately 30 minutes. I wanted the interviews to feel informal, so I had a series of guiding questions that I wove into a conversation. The loose structure of the interview allowed the teachers to go deeper into their answers. It allowed me to understand how the timetable affected student engagement and the various successes and struggles associated with the timetable change.

I also corresponded with other teachers not directly involved with the changed timetable for their perspective as non core classroom teachers. Although I did not select them for interviews, their perspective was used to triangulate what other teachers had said alongside my own observations and field notes.

Additionally, I interviewed two different groups of students whose timetable had been affected. The Year 8 students I interviewed had experience with the timetable from the previous year and with the modified timetable. The Year 7 students were all in their first year at Avon School and had no prior experience in Secondary School.

Findings -

“When it goes well, it is fun to teach. When it does not go well, students look at the clock and wish class was over.”

HENRY:

One of the teachers I worked with was Henry. Henry is an experienced teacher at Avon School who loves teaching, but wants to do more than just lecture everyday. Henry dove head first into the timetable change and did his best to try new techniques that would inspire students. In addition to teaching combined English, History, and Geography to one cohort of Year 7 students, Henry also taught History to Year 8, Year 9, Year 10, Year 11, Year 12, and Year 13 students. There were three main takeaways from the work with Henry.

1. High levels of frustration with the volume of work involved:

One of Henry’s frustrations was with planning for a long time and then only delivering a lesson once. Henry said, “One of the difficulties is we do not repeat lessons. All of the teachers have to teach all of the year groups in the school. We spend time planning a good lesson, and then you won’t do that lesson again.” This was a common refrain from every teacher I spoke with at Avon School. It seemed to be very difficult for teachers to try to innovate when they were being spread so thin.

2. Noted improvement in engagement of students:

Henry noticed that the level of engagement had risen drastically with his Year 7 students. He described, “It is a level of engagement I have never been able to do. I put in more work planning for my Year 7’s, but it is worth it, because I see them for longer. It is so easy and so powerful.”

Since Henry saw his students for eight hours each week, he was able to devote extra time to modify some lessons and projects to meet the needs of the students, “ I think I understand better what the students want to do. Students see that I care about them and am not there in the room just to keep them busy. The students are more engaged, because the work is more directed towards them.”

3. Noted improvement in quality of relationships:

Not only do the teachers know their students better, but students know each other better and feel more comfortable giving and receiving feedback. Henry explained, “There is a group identity with my Year 7’s. The kids know each other better, so they are more likely to work with each other. There is also a little element of competition, but it is good. The students push each other and want to do their best.”

Since Henry sees these students for eight hours a week, he invests more time outside of class to support his students. “One thing I have done is send emails to parents and students at the end of each week with examples of student work. The payoff of the emails has been brilliant! It also makes it easier to contact parents when a student is bad. With groups I see an hour a week, it is not worth the extra time to contact the parents.”

4. Gains in literacy.

On thing Henry did early in the year was to teach students how to critique each other’s work. With the extra time devoted to assignments and the multiple drafts and revisions students do, Henry has noticed significant gains in Literacy. Henry told me, “The time and process of drafting and revision of the projects has helped us see big gains in Literacy. Through drafts and critiques you can see improvement. The kids want to go through the critiques, because there is a clear purpose. We are doing a project about our town. The students wrote letters to their Member of Parliament about how they wanted their neighborhood improved. Part of the process was Literacy, but since they knew the letters were being sent to London, the kids wanted more critiques. We did one formal critique and the students did at least four informal critiques.” Henry went on to describe how each student improved their writing skills by analyzing each other’s work.

One of Henry’s students boasted, “I went from a level 4a to a 5c and we still have several months of school left this year!” That equates o about a year and a half’s worth of improvement in about seven months.

Overall, Henry liked the flexibility that the new timetable offered him. “I teach my Year 7’s everyday for large periods of time. That has been a big change for us, but I think the change has been great. I can give students the freedom to go deeper.”

LOUISE:

Another teacher I worked with was an English teacher named Louise. Louise teaches combined English, History, and Geography to Year 8’s in addition to all of the other year groups, just like Henry. Louise is an experienced teacher who was sick of doing the same old things in class. She actively searches for ways to develop a variety of skills for her students.

1. Modifying lessons to increase engagement.

Louise noticed that the new timetable allowed her to modify her lessons so that each student would work on topics that interested them.

Here is one example Louise told me about, “The teachers who are more experienced are able to find what interests the students and modify the lesson to keep the students engaged. In one small project, I let students choose the topics that they would be interested in. Boys liked WWI and WWII, where the girls wanted to look at Poverty. Personalizing the content helped the students stay more engaged.”

2. Teachers who embraced the timetable change modified their style and had success.

Louise told me that there were teachers who did not fully embrace the change. Reasons for not fully embracing the timetable change varied. There were a few teachers who told me that they had no idea that they would teach these combined classes until they returned from summer break. Others were inexperienced teachers who were new and were going through new teacher struggles. In these cases, the teachers started the year behind in their planning and were not able to catch up to make their classrooms as effective as more experienced teachers.

Louise mentioned how some teachers struggled to change their ways with the new timetable, “Teachers with established routines and who break up their time are finding it easier. The teachers who split up their time chunks into stations and give a clear agenda for what is happening in the day have students who can focus for longer.”

Teachers who remained tied to a traditional lecture style with students generally struggled more. “I see no perceptible improvement in my skills” one student in an inexperienced teacher’s class lamented. Another student in a struggling teacher’s class complained, “On Friday, we have five hours of English. It is just staying in the classroom all day doing the same thing. It is boring.” Another student from that same class chimed in, “it is better when we do different things, but some classes we do three hours of the same thing.” When I asked a teacher who embraced the change what is happening in the classrooms of struggling teachers she told me that in some cases, “The teachers are simply lecturing for hours at a time. I can’t bare to be in a chair that long, I can’t imagine being a student in those classes!”

Louise went on to explain that teachers who are embracing the new timetable are designing rich projects that excite the students. Louise added, “The students are challenged to create and design products that go on walls all around the school. This is having a positive impact on the school. “The kids are loving seeing their work on the walls and want to do it more. Other staff not involved want to replicate the process and put more student work up around school.”

3. Struggles with multiple drafts.

It was not always smooth sailing in classrooms with experienced teachers. Louise explained, “Some students struggle with the idea of multiple drafts. They are used to ticking off tasks, which is traditional style. Some students do not see the extra drafts as progress, because they want to move on and tick off the next task.”

Similarities between Louise and Henry:

Like Henry, Louise struggled with a broad teaching load. In speaking with Louise, it became clear that balancing the demands of teaching a group of students for eight lessons per week and the challenges of teaching every year group increased the workload significantly. In regards to timetabling Louise said, “Planning for that amount of time and intensity is a phenomenal amount of work. It is difficult to plan engaging activities for that much time. We don’t really get planning time together, although we do have one hour on Wednesday afternoon to plan. Another struggle is the immediacy of it all. I see my Year 8’s for two hours on Tuesday afternoon, then for three hours on Wednesday morning, then for two more hours on Thursday.”

Like Henry, Louise was noticing large gains in Literacy with her Year 8 students. Louise said, “In Year 8 we are noting bigger strides in Literacy more rapidly. Multiple drafts are helping, because students are seeing that teacher for 16 hours per fortnight. There is more contact time for teachers to interact with students and for students to interact with students. It is intense, but in a good way.”