.5 Organization, Scheduling, and Instructional Patterns

I would like to have national experimentation, state experimentation and local experimentation. These experimental organizational patterns are one of the major elements of the national experimental school system.

The length of the school day and school year is another kind of organizational pattern. If I had my way, schools would open at about seven in the morning and stay open until about ten at night. That would be my ideal school. Kids would come and go, and teachers would come and go. Some teachers would come in at eight and leave at five, and some teachers would come in at one and leave at ten. Some teachers would come in at eight in the morning and leave at ten at night, but take four or five hours out in the middle of the day. There is nothing sacred about having everybody at school on the same schedule. I think the school serves the society better with that kind of flexibility where people can come and go with flexible schedules.

I would also have year round schools, and I would have seven weeks off for everybody. I'd have one week's vacation every thirteen weeks; twelve weeks of school then a week's vacation. In each of those twelve weeks I would have nine weeks of regular school and three weeks of either remediation or enrichment or vacation. Everyone would be there for the four nine-week programs, then both teachers and students would be there typically for three of the four three-week programs, and everybody would have one of the three-week times off. So everybody would have four weeks of vacation plus an additional three weeks sometimes.

We need experimental instructional patterns. We need to try different kinds of things and see if they work. I'd like to find out, for example, whether there is some benefit in having some large group instruction in high school. If you have five hundred kids taking US history, might it be useful every once in a while to put the five hundred kids in an auditorium and do something with all five hundred? Might it be useful just in terms of instructional resources? Every time I have one class with all five hundred, I am saving twenty hours of instruction in terms of what it would take to teach those kids twenty-five at a time in twenty classes. So I have one teacher instead of twenty. That means I have nineteen hours of teacher time that are now available to do something else. Maybe a combination of large groups and small groups so that sometimes teachers would be dealing with groups of ten to twelve instead of always dealing with groups of twenty-five. We need to experiment with different kinds of instructional patterns. That is hard, and teachers are not familiar with that idea; they are not prepared for it, so if you were going to do that you would have to have kind of a developmental staff development and support and experimental resources to help them.

	What experimental organizational patterns are one of the major elements of the national school system?	Answer Here
	Mrs. Smith sends her daughter, Angela, to school on the bus each morning at 8:00 a.m. She is a teacher, and would really like to be able to attend her daughter's PTA meetings rather than her own at times, plus she needs to be at home when her daughter gets home from school to pick her up at the bus stop. How would national experimentation allow her to do this?	Answer Here