The flexible scheduling paradigm: The prototype school

Abstract

The flexible scheduling paradigm (FSP) improves student learning by dynamically redeploying teachers and other pedagogical resources to provide students with customized learning conditions over shorter time periods called 'mini-terms' instead of semesters or years. By conceptualizing the school curriculum as a physical map, we customize the routing of students through curriculum using a core curriculum-targeted mastery-based approach. FSP increases deployed teacher effectiveness by making customized mentoring part of teacher's regular schedules and by deploying teachers to their strengths. We establish a prima facie case for FSP by building comparative simulations of various schools as they are currently run (the Present Schools) and the same schools as they would be run with FSP (the Schools of the Future). Statistical results of the simulations confirmed that using FSP can increase key educational metrics including graduation rates, final course grades, mean grades in core curriculum, average teacher effectiveness, and the quality of teacher deployed expertise.