Why does MGCS start 1 hour later on Wednesdays?
Research consistently shows that high-quality teacher professional development is one of the most effective ways to improve student learning. We believe that investing one hour a week in equipping our teachers with best practice instructional strategies through sustained, ongoing training will be repaid many times over through stronger engagement in the classroom and a richer learning experience for our students.
Why a late start vs an early release?
Having professional development sessions in the afternoon is not effective in terms of getting the most out of that time. Teachers are almost always managing multiple tasks in the afternoon after dismissal – grading papers, responding to emails and preparing their classroom for the next day, etc. – all of which are usually more time sensitive than professional development. Those are the urgent things that are always the priority and push teaching training to the back. We wanted to create space during the week where we could emphasize professional development without teachers having to focus on those urgent things and that time is most effective in the morning.
What about the lost instructional time for students?
We consider instructional time in the classroom to be valuable and do not want to lose time whenever possible. However, we feel that through effective professional development and training, we will be able to maximize instructional time even more, helping to support and challenge students to where the time we are missing will not have a negative impact on student learning. The training and development teachers will receive will help to enhance student learning throughout the week, including the days where we are not missing any time at all.
Why Wednesdays?
Historically, Mondays and Fridays are the most widely missed days on the school calendar due to scheduled breaks and holidays. To see the benefit of this for our teachers and ultimately, for the students, it is important for the training to be sustained and consistent. In addition, we have a large number of our middle school students who participate in sports throughout the year and many of our athletic events are on Tuesdays, which gives them a little buffer after coming back in the evening and spending time with family while also working on homework.
Why don’t you use one of the half-days or an extra teacher workday instead of a weekly late-start?
During this process, we considered lots of different options, both within the various experiences our leadership team has had at other schools and looking at other independent schools in North Carolina and the United States and taking notes of their models and examples.
When we were looking at these options and best practice research on teacher development, we noted that effective training needs to be sustained and consistent, with coaching and feedback included to have the most positive impact. Through weekly sessions on critical needs such as curriculum initiatives, vertical team meetings and training on classroom strategies, teachers will be able to expand their techniques, practice with different methods and then come back together to reflect, refine and implement well-developed approaches. In order for this to be as effective as possible, we chose a weekly time for training instead of more sporadic half-day or workday models.
What about Chapel and Tribes?
Our weekly lower and middle school chapel programs and our Tribes meetings are crucial aspects of student life, spiritual formation and who we are as a school. We will continue to have those vital programs on Wednesdays after our late-start morning. Between our lower and middle school divisions, we have a lot of overlap of staffing and schedules, and in order to preserve continuity on the other days of the week, we tried to contain all of our consistent scheduling variables and exceptions into one day.
