Whittier Planning Time Pilot Plan

2002-03 School Year

A committee of teachers has been working with the principal to consider plans that would improve instruction. The consensus was that working in teams would enable teachers to share ideas, children, strategies and plans.

A lack of common planning time has made teaming difficult for teachers at the elementary level. This committee of teachers developed a plan that will provide common planning time during the school day.

The plan involves adding ten minutes of instruction time to each school day. This time would be added to the beginning of the school day. This plan would save approximately 30 hours over the 181 day school year. This would provide one-half day each month for 9 months for staff planning. Minutes would be added to the beginning of each day. For kindergarten classes, five minutes would be added to the beginning of the day and five minutes at the end of the day.

As compensation for the additional 30 hours worked, teachers would be excused from building staff meetings and NCA meetings (11 @ 60 minutes, and 7 @ 90 minutes for a total of 21.5 hours). Teachers would work 2 hrs. and 20 minutes each planning day. (21.5 hrs. divided by 9 = 2 hrs. 23 minutes). This time would be used for planning, teaming, collaborating, NCA and staff development.

The plan was proposed to staff at a building staff meeting. All teachers were very supportive of the plan and 100% of the teachers who would be affected by the plan voted (anonymously) to support it.

Attached is a detailed calendar indicating all whole and half-days for the 2001-03 school year. This includes 4 comp days (*), 2 staff development days (#) and 9 planning days (+). The total instructional time for students is 1099 hours and 5 minutes. This is as close as we could come to the 1098 hours required by the state. The total days in session is 181 days. This is the number required by the state.