Student Contributor: J Engeland
The class schedule is a tool that helps students know what to expect from the day and mentally and physically prepare themselves for the upcoming activities. This is helpful because students like to know what is expected of them and what they are going to be doing throughout the day.
The class schedule in this instance is something you provide for the students. This is a general outline of how the day is going to look for the students. You would want to include all specials like music, PE, and library. Also, when lunches and recesses will happen. It’s important to include times for activities that are happening out of the classroom so that students don’t have to ask, when is lunch? When can we go to recess? Or other questions such as that, they know they can look at the schedule and know what is happening. Once you have filled in all those categories it leaves you with time when learning will happen inside the classroom. You can fill in general ideas like math, ELA, or science. Or you can be specific such as adding fractions, French and Indian war, etc. Not putting time frames on in class learning allows you to be flexible depending on how long your lesson actually ends up taking.
This tool works well in the preventative phase because it is something that takes place before the learning begins. It is a tool that students know they can look at to see what is taking place that particular day and what they can expect. This is really beneficial because it will prevent confusion about when certain things are happening in the day such as specials or assemblies, and students know they can look at the schedule instead of coming to you and asking you when activities are taking place, or what are we doing today. While you may remind students about the schedule throughout the day, it is a preventative tool because it is simply about taking away the anxiety of not knowing what is going to happen and letting students prepare themselves for the expectations of the day.
This tool aligns more with collaborative or teacher directed. If you are teacher directed then you would decide yourself what is happening that day and when. If you are collaborative then likely you would still have most of the input as the teacher but you would allow for student input, in ways such as maybe you know the students really want to work on their science more today then maybe you would put science in the schedule over another activity you were going to do.
More Information –
Tool Source: My mentor teacher, Mr. McMannis
I used the tool of daily class schedule in my 2nd-grade classroom. There were 14 students with whom I practiced this supportive tool at a suburban school. This tool did not take much to prepare for, all I needed to know before I wrote the schedule out was what we were learning/teaching that day. Before using this tool, my mentor teacher and I would be asked constantly. What are we doing after this war? What specialist do we have today? Once we started writing the schedule up on the board, we would go over it at the beginning of the day to inform students what we have going on. After writing it up on the board, we would rarely get asked what we were doing today. The students started to understand their role in this tool by being able to see what was next during the day. One thing I would adjust to make this better is not including time since teaching time to my second graders if we are late by one minute, they will call us out on it so instead of writing the time, just putting the schedule in order of what we will do will prevent students from disrupting you when you’re teaching to let you know we’re supposed to be on the next activity.
Preventative: Daily Class Schedule:
4th grade
26 students
Suburban
To prepare for this tool I had to create different subjects, specialities, lunch, recess, etc papers on canva. I then printed those out and cut them into to stripes and laminated them. I then put magnets on the back of each of them so they would be able to be on the white board. You can also buy schedules on amazon or teachers pay teachers. After getting that prepared all I had to do was find a spot for the schedule to be placed and for all students to see. The reason I chose this tool is because my mentor teacher does not have a physical schedule for students to see and they are constantly asking when the next subject/activity is and/or what time lunch or recess is at. By implementing this strategy all of that changed. When students still asked questions about the schedule I would redirect them to look at the schedule and everytime they built that habit. It also helped with student’s time management because they were able ot see how long they had until the next subject or activity. What I have found is that student are more successful when there is a schedule that is followed and they are able to visually see it. An adjustment I would add is to have a digitally timer next to it because that would be very beneficially for individual assessments and projects that are happening during the day for students to know how long work time is.
Preventative: 5th grade, 24 students, suburban area.
Writing a schedule for the day was very easy to prepare for as my mentor teacher keeps the same subjects in the same order each day. Though they have different specialist times, and classes during different days of the week, it still is easy to prepare. This tool is something that is used every day to remind students of how their day will look. We go over it as a class during the entry task. The success I noticed as I used this tool is that students feel prepared in what they will be doing during the day and ask less questions about what will happen that day, instead they just refer to the schedule on the board. Students did understand the role of the new tool as it was explained when we first started doing it. The adjustment I think I could make to make this tool even more effective is having what the students will need for each section of the day to give them an opportunity to prepare ahead of time and get things put away or taken out when the time comes.
This strategy has been implemented in my classroom for about a month now. We started to use a daily class schedule when we would get many questions in the middle of lessons and throughout the day about what our day looks like. We started writing it on the board in the beginning of the day, and during the morning meeting, the first thing my mentor and I do is go over the schedule clearly with our students. We then ask for any questions and give them a minute to do so. We answer the questions they have and this has greatly reduced the amount of questions we have throughout the day. We also use this strategy as something we can simply say to students “check the schedule” when they ask a question during the day because more often then not their answer is on the board. This has overall helped our students know what is coming throughout the day, and helps our students who come from chaos at home to be able to use the schedule as a resource to help them stay calm, etc. This will be used in my future classroom for years to come.