More planning time for teachers will mean changes to the length of the school day for middle-schoolers in neighboring Jordan and Canyons districts.
Beginning next year, all Jordan middle schools will start two hours later on Fridays to give teachers paid time for team planning. Canyons middle schools will have the option of starting 60 to 90 minutes late or ending early one day a week, pending board approval.
The change in pickup and drop-off times will be an adjustment for busy families. For the districts, it means tweaking bus schedules.
But team-teaching isn't new. Other states have long cultivated so-called Professional Learning Communities. Utah's own Granite District has been doing it for eight years.
Elsewhere in Utah, though, teachers have pow-wowed on their own time and their own dime, said Michael Sirois, student achievement director at Canyons. "This is our way of formalizing and encouraging more collaboration. Teachers are accustomed to working in isolation. That's not the model we want here. We want teamwork."
Teachers at Crescent View Middle School are already believers.
The Sandy school adopted the "two-heads-are-better-than-one" approach in 2007, using trust lands money to pay teachers for an extra hour after school.
The program is voluntary, but most teachers participate, which "speaks to their commitment," said the school's principal, Greg Leavitt.
And while it's too early to say whether test scores have improved, Leavitt said grades are up and fewer kids are falling through the cracks.
"The kids like it, parents like it. It's just common sense," said Leavitt.
The teams start by asking, what do we want students to know, how do we know they know it and what do we do if they don't?
The idea is to get rid of the fluff and come to a consensus about what's most important, said Leavitt. "There are only so many hours in the day."
After some brainstorming, Crescent View's math team agreed to quiz kids on key concepts that don't necessarily appear on standardized tests.
Each week, the group compares scores.
"If all of Steve's kids got question No. 2 right, and 35 percent of mine got it wrong, I can ask him, 'Gee, what did you do differently?'" said the team leader, Royce Shelley.
Said Steve Kinney who teaches 7th grade math and geometry: "We all have our own style...Sometimes kids need to hear it from a different voice or in a different way before something sticks. Or maybe it's hearing it for the 80th time or just one-on-one attention."
Crescent View also has interdisciplinary teams of history, science and language teachers.
At one such meeting, 8th grade teachers arranged homework drops for a student at the hospital and agonized over the best way to reach another who is chronically absent. A science teacher came with happy news of a struggling reader's academic gains.
"Success breeds success. We can build upon that and hopefully turn some lives around," said Steven Murphy, who teaches history.
The group also brainstormed ways to weave the week's science lesson on motion and force into a lecture on Hitler's Nazi regime.
Doing so reinforces learning and is particularly important for young adolescents whose developing brains are at the stage where they are beginning to understand complex relationships, said Kerrie Naylor, executive director of curriculum and staff development at Jordan. "As a principal I would have killed for paid time for my teachers to collaborate."
