'We own time' - scheduling at King Middle school

At King Middle there are 7 schedules or timetables. One schedule which the whole school follows (above) and then each house has their own schedule which has been organised by the teaching team for the house (the blanks above). The school runs a 6day rotating schedule.

The overall whole school wide schedule has the following

Home room - first 10 mins of everyday

Lunch - 20 min + 5 min refresh/movement time

Foreign Language/reading - 40 min every day

PE/Health lesson - 3 days per cycle

2 x 50 min Crew meetings every cycle

Crew day 2 - check in/community building initiatives

Academic Crew day 5 - focused on learning targets with crew advisor supporting

Targeted Learning Time - 3 days per cycle

So once these parts are in across a school wide timetable, then it's over to the team of teachers in that house to decide how they use the rest of the time. 

The house team is a group of 4 who work with 80 students. They teach the students and are the advisors for this house too. Teams stay together in 6&7 and loop,  two different 8th grade teams exist.

 The group of core teachers are 

Maths

Science

Lang/Arts

Humanities

These teachers design the expeditions together, organise time, house committee meetings, etc. They meet for planning time 40 mins every other day whilst students are involved in FL/reading. 

Thoughts

A team really knowing students well 

Collaborative staff planning means that the student learning experience is richer. There are 2-3 expeditions of 10-12 weeks and staff are encouraged to recycle expeditions to perfect them, this also helps since the expeditions must be planned and tight. There was a 'sell by date' of 3 years on expeditions though

the team have to be talking all of the time and understand learning targets from each area for academic crew and TLT to work

Each house lives in an area of school which means movement around the school at various times has little effect on other students

The lack of 'recreational outdoor breaktimes' has little effect since every opportunity is taken by teachers to get the students outside to learn. There was discussion about how beneficial longer lunches and breaks are...