The traditional use of forty-five minute periods provides many advantages in scheduling, breaking up the day in appropriate segments and with a great deal of appropriate consideration for the attention spans and learning capabilities of students. The amount of manipulation these time chunks allow for is also useful in the scheduling and programming of teaching hours at educational institutions, as well.
Scheduling/Programming in Education
Appropriate and efficient scheduling is one of the most complex and yet most essential tasks of a school administrator or planner, affecting all areas of the educational institution and all stakeholders in the educational process. An effective scheduling plan can mean the difference between effectively utilizing the budget available in providing the education students need and the compensation educators deserve or at least require, or not being able to meet needs because the schedule ultimately wastes time or inefficiently allocates teaching/student hours. Because there are distinct defined goals for each group of students and for each educator, and a certain number of scheduled teaching hours that are used to measure these goals as well as a certain number of hours that can be pushed into the available budget. That is, the budget and its manipulation dictates how many total teaching hours can be funded, and the schedule must be able to meet educational requirements within this limited framework.
The number of teaching staff available is also clearly an issue both in regards to the budget and when it comes to scheduling. Excessive teachers can cause budget overruns without necessarily creating any easing in scheduling, and in fact too may teachers can greatly complicate scheduling given certain budget constraints. Hiring and firing needs to be undertaken with care, therefore, and with an understanding of both budget and scheduling needs. Maintaining an apporoate number of teaching staff is a job of near-constant juggling, although some consistency is also needed in order to maintain the integrity and the quality of education at the institutions. The practical constraints and educational needs of the institution must be taken into account in hiring, firing, and scheduling.
Scheduling the right number of teachers to fill the educational needs and requirements of the students and the institution/district, then, can directly impact the budget of the school and might necessitate the movement of funds to provide for more teaching positions or more teaching hours, while at the same time if scheduling can be accomplished in a more efficient manner the budget can be rearranged to send more funding to areas other than the provision of adequate staffing. These elements of running an educational institution at any grade level are all incredibly intertwined, and indeed it is impossible to effectively discuss scheduling, budgeting, or staffing without reference to the other two elements. It is in coordinating all of these elements towards the goal of providing an appropriate education towards which administrators are constantly working, while confronting numerous obstacles.
Determining whether or not an appropriate education is being delivered depends first and foremost on whether or not the specified umber of credit hours for various areas of education are being met. Again, this comes down directly to scheduling or programming issues, and thus it is in schedule development that that foundations of an institution's educational appropriateness is found. If credit requirements are not being fulfilled through current programming, reassessments and realignments of budgets in order to provide for enhanced scheduling (or at least a major reevaluation and redesign of the schedule itself to better meet the credit requirements of the school's various programs) would be required. Meeting credit requirements should be seen as the primary goal of scheduling.
Credit recovery is also an important element of many academic institutions, relied on by an increasing number of students in many areas, and this also has a significant impact on scheduling. While meeting the basic credit requirements of the various programs needs to be the primary priority of the scheduling efforts, ensuring that needed levels of credit recovery programs and hours are made available inasmuch as is possible given budget constraints and attendant staffing levels. That is, credit recovery must be a highly-regarded secondary goal in scheduling and programming efforts undertaken by administrators in guiding their institutions and allocating resources, however it must also remain very much a secondary consideration. Only if the budget and schedule meets all basic credit requirements can additional teaching hours be scheduled for extra credit recovery.
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