Piedmont City School District – Structuring Time in a CBE Classroom

Our school day is designed with three main focuses. Students spend their days in Team Time, My Time, and Class Time to allow students time to master standards. The mission for Team Time is to create a family atmosphere while helping students build accountability for setting and achieving personal, academic, and career goals. Team Time is also used to help students build character ed, develop soft skills, and complete team-building activities. Team Time class meets once a day, three days a week. Faculty at the school each have one Team that they mentor for the students’ duration at the school. The purpose of My Time class is to fill educational gaps with personalized instruction and individualized learning plans. Students in various grades are structured in one My Time class with one teacher. The students may work on individual content classes with the one teacher giving support across the four academic core classes. My Time allows students the opportunity to meet their individual academic goals that are created during their Team Time. Some students have a variety of one to three My Time classes per day. Class Time is traditional academic core classes with small group instruction to help students master content standards. Each student attends all four of their content specific classes each day. Team Time, My Time and Class Time structured classes are strategically designed at our elementary, middle and high school ranging from grades fourth to tenth.

The administration and staff at the school system wanted to provide time for students to grow emotionally and intellectually.

Our school has a large population of students who have parents/guardians that either are not able to help them academically or not available when needed because of work. We want to provide as much time at school to help students be successful so all students have opportunities, not just the ones who have help at home.

We have found that students truly enjoy the activities and mentoring during their Team Time. On a scale ranging from 1-4 with 4 being the highest, the average score is 3.48 for students that enjoy team building activities. Based on our survey data from students, most students enjoy team building and character lessons the most. Many students have commented the best part about Team Time is “team activities” and “the best thing about team time has been connecting better with other students and the teacher.” They also like having My Times during the school day to work on standards so that they do not have as much homework as they had in a lecture-style classroom.

We have moved to an eight period day to link classes and allow everyone to have at least one My Time during the school day. This has shortened the class periods, but so far, this has not seemed to be a major issue.

Districts must ensure that they have a plan for scheduling to allow students the time that they need in their classes. Traditional classes typically last 45-60 minutes. My Time class provides students an additional 50 minutes to complete work for standards with a certified teacher. Districts must also ensure that they have the staff in place that are needed so that the classes are not overloaded. The average class size at our middle school is less than 25 students per one teacher.

As can be seen on our Mastery Schedule, My Time has the same amount of time as all other classes. Three days a week they are an average of 42 minutes in length and two days a week they average 45 minutes in length.

The presentation shows the overall idea of our mastery-based program as well as how our times periods work during the school day.

Please contact Jerry Snow (jsnow@piedmont.k12.al.us)