Rewired

Rewired

When Headmaster David Dini announced the first new schedule in more than 30 years, it was met with apprehension. But with its implementation six months away, The ReMarker has tackled the questions that face the community as students have to be rewired to the different challenges that come with the schedule.

Working behind the scenes

For the past three years, a six-person committee led by Headmaster David Dini has been creating a brand new schedule. Now, it’s finally time to put it in place.

A new schedule has been discussed at 10600 Preston Rd. for decades, ever since it was mentioned in Goals for St. Mark’s I in 1984. Seven years ago, the school began to consider ways to improve the current schedule, but the idea never gained enough traction to continue.

“There was a fairly lengthy process conducted, and then it kind of faded,” Dini said. “We reached the point where we couldn’t get any consensus or momentum, so it died on the vine. And then we picked that conversation back up and started talking about it again a few years ago.”

Then, on Jan. 10, 2017, a new schedule actually seemed possible as the Board of Trustees adopted Goals for St. Mark’s IV — the fourth statement of strategic goals for the school. This road map declares the school should “explore, design and implement a daily schedule that better addresses the evolving needs of students and faculty.”

With this in mind, Dini and members of the faculty and administration worked to develop four main “drivers” that would serve as the foundation and guiding principles for the entire project:

• Sustain strength and quality of current program.

• Enhance student health and well-being.

• Improve alignment and collaboration opportunities across campus.

• Increase flexibility to better accommodate current and future programs.

“We came up with those at the very beginning,” Dini said. “Everybody said, ‘Okay, that’s our true North, that’s what we’re shooting for.’ Whatever we do has to address those four goals, and everybody agreed on that at the outset.”

Dini spearheaded a six-member committee – comprised of the three division heads, Associate Headmaster John Ashton and Director of Academic Information Systems Paul Mlakar – that has been responsible for guiding the project.

“There’s been a slow process of moving through the schedule department by department, division by division and thinking about every aspect of our program,” Dini said. “It’s been a really healthy and really productive process.”

The committee wanted to ensure that every voice was heard at every step along the way. They worked down to department chairs and then to the faculty as a whole, going through a set of repeated cycles of constructing and deconstructing the schedule, tweaking their ideas at every meeting with different selections of faculty members.

“We put faculty in rooms with faculty they don’t typically teach with,” Dini said. “You might have a Lower School language arts teacher with a Middle School humanities teacher and an Upper School science teacher. People were really mixed together in these conversations.”

While the committee valued the feedback from the school’s own teachers and faculty members, Dini wanted to get different perspectives from other schools about their schedules. He visited schools such as the Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles and Polytechnic High School in Pasadena to better understand what they valued about their unique schedules.

“We’re not going to replicate what other schools are doing,” Dini said. “Rather, let’s go sit down with students at St. Alban’s and the Collegiate School for instance, and let’s listen to how they think about their day, and how their schedule works for them and what are the pros, what are the cons, how it’s affected the culture of the school.”

After learning what worked best for each school, the committee began to pick and choose aspects from each schedule and worked to implement them into the plan for the new schedule.

Each decade, the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest (ISAS) conducts a self study process at independent schools like St. Mark’s. This process affords the opportunity for schools to reflect on their missions, efforts to fulfill that mission, strengths and areas which call for improvement.

In the most recent self study, conducted October 2018, ISAS representatives observed classes and talked to students and alumni to gauge their opinions on the school and how it could improve. The Visiting Committee Report supported the idea of designing a new daily schedule and recommended that the school “carefully analyze the different ways students, faculty, and staff use structured and unstructured time to improve the student experience.”

In addition to the ISAS study, Dini and the school sought the opinion of Independent School Management (ISM) consulting, represented by Senior Executive Consultant Roxanne Higgins. Higgins spent one week talking to students, teachers and parents to fully understand the current schedule and how it could be upgraded.

“She shared a broader perspective, which is, in many ways, just designed to push ourselves out of our comfort zone a little bit,” Dini said. “She got down into a lot of detail across all three divisions of the school and helped us be willing to ask some hard questions.”

Higgins outlined the positives and negatives she observed at the school and presented a four-hour slide presentation to the faculty during a teacher in-service day.

“Some of the weaknesses I observed were boys who are over scheduled, too much homework for the students, too many courses to prepare for on any given day and lack of time for student and faculty collaboration and growth,” Higgins said.

All of the feedback collected from faculty, visiting other schools, ISAS and ISM contributed in some form to the new schedule. One decision that came specifically from visiting other schools was to make a schedule change for all three divisions at the same time. Schools that had made scheduling changes in the past regretted only adjusting their high school’s schedules.

“That was one of the fundamental decisions we made early on, that we want to look at this school-wide,” Dini said. “Recognize that there are going to be some things we’re going to do that will still be unique by division but to bring greater alignment across the school, across all 12 grades.”

And that’s another focus of the new schedule – to allow teachers to continue teaching across multiple divisions. In fact, the new schedule makes this practice even easier because of more unity between divisions.

“There’s value in perhaps having a teacher in Middle School and then seeing him or her again in the Upper School or as a coach or whatever the case may be,” Dini said.

The new schedule also builds more community time into each day. Middle and upper school will now start at 8:30 a.m. instead of the normal 8:00 a.m., and lunch will be a time in the day rather than a period, meaning each division will eat lunch at the same time every day all together. These two new pockets of community time will offer students and teachers more opportunities to meet. The Lower School will also be adding a community time in the morning, similar to the thirty-minute period the middle and upper school enjoy now.

“These changes are going to facilitate a lot of community time that we don’t currently have,” Dini said.

The new schedule will also add more variety.

Instead of having every class every day in the exact same order, an eight-day rotation will mix up the order and timing of classes. The purpose behind this change is to distribute “disadvantages” evenly between classes. Now, all classes will at some point have to follow an assembly that runs five minutes longer than expected instead of the same class losing those five minutes every single long assembly.

“I think it’ll be very valuable not having every class every day,” Dini said. “It allows for some breathing room with each class in that the classes rotate and move. When you’re getting a breather in one class, maybe you’re pushing in a few of your other classes.”

Of course, Dini recognizes that the schedule may not be welcomed by all, but he knows that nothing is locked in yet.

Over the next few years, as the schedule is implemented into daily life, it will continue to evolve.

“We’re going to have to be flexible and nimble, and there are going to be things a year in where we go, ‘Okay, we didn’t completely anticipate this, but let’s be flexible and respond,’” Dini said. “It’ll probably be a several year process of adjusting to a new framework, and we’ll learn from it and grow from it.”

No schedule can ever be perfect – only made better and better over time.

“That’s why it’s been a transparent open process throughout,” Dini said. “We want every teacher on campus, every department chair, every division head, contributing.”

Teachers will continue to adjust their curriculums to fit the new schedule during the spring and summer. Course selections with advisors will occur in March.

Dini believes that while the community will take some time to adjust to the newness of next year’s schedule, the mission was always to better the school and community as a whole.

“I think our goal is to be demonstrably better, and better be able to support the needs and the development of the Marksmen who are here,” Dini said.