Unlocking Time As A Resource To Personalize Education

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Chris Walsh. Former teacher, Chris has worked for a number of leading national education organizations and has led several successful ed tech startups and was the co-founder of the Google Teacher Academy. Chris is currently head of growth and impact for Able, the first dynamic school scheduling platform.

[00:36] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:38] SPEAKER_02:

Chris, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:40] SPEAKER_01:

Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:41] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Chris, take us through just a little bit of your journey as an educator and as a technology leader that got you to this point where you're working with ABLE on this challenge of helping schools develop their schedules. What kind of happened in your career that got you to this point?

[00:56] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I've got a lot of gray hairs. I've been in education now since my 25th year. I started as a middle school teacher teaching language arts and social studies and doing some digital media in the early days in the 90s. And then kind of got in the tech side pretty quickly. That led me down some really interesting paths to work with folks like the Kipp Foundation in the early days of its expansion. WestEd, one of the leading R&D groups, kind of building out e-learning for them.

[01:21]

And then New Tech Network, which has about 200 plus high tech project based schools. I was the director of innovation for them. And then doing stints, you know, as an entrepreneur as well, founded a couple of tech companies. And my last one was called Zaption, which was an interactive video learning platform. And I had a lot of fun with that. And then that was acquired last year by Workday.

[01:41]

So so I've kind of had an interesting journey in in the school space, in the nonprofit space and in the for profit space. And It may not make sense to anybody else, but I'm just following that little red thread, and it makes a lot of sense to me. And I think the thing that attracted me to Able, beyond, of course, the amazing people, is the mission. Able is very aligned with the work that I've done over the course of my career to really use technology as a lever for change in some really interesting ways. And in particular, Able is focused on unlocking time as a key way to kind of help schools become more personalized over time and Even going back to some of the first things I did as an ed tech guy at the school district I worked at, one of the first things was to help convert a master schedule from an old FileMaker Pro database into an SIS. And the pain of doing that and trying to translate kind of time with some of the crude tools we had at the time.

[02:37]

was very, very difficult. And I remember that vividly being something that I thought, you know, we can do this better. And that's kind of what Abel's looking at is ways to not just make things more efficient for school principals and save them a ton of time as they build the master schedule, but also to leverage that as a tool to help them reach their goals and outcomes and meet those priorities better than they have before. So that's kind of my entry point into all of this.

[03:01] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. I think time is such a critical and overlooked resource. We seem to treat time as if we can just cram more and more into it. and treat the schedule, you know, at a certain point, obviously the schedule has to be fixed and we have to run with it. But I remember coming into an elementary school as a principal and looking at the schedule and thinking, okay, where is this class supposed to be on this particular day? But that's different from where they're supposed to be tomorrow.

[03:24]

And the teachers never have common prep and their prep moves around all the time. And I mean, I very quickly realized what a big deal this was for students, what a big deal this was for teachers in terms of their ability to plan and to collaborate and to have some consistency. And if I understand correctly, ABLE is primarily focused on the secondary school challenges of scheduling. Is that correct?

[03:43] SPEAKER_01:

Today, I mean, just because there's a lot of pain, there's a lot of moving parts in all levels. But especially when you start getting the kid electives and pathways and things that people are doing at the middle school and high school level, that's where we're starting today. But not far behind that is elementary. I mean, we'll be working on elementary tools this fall because it's just a different kind of pain. Elementary, as you just described, You know, what's interesting, though, and I think you'll appreciate this as a former principal that, you know, to all of us in education, this is an obvious pain point. But to people outside of it, nobody really knows how difficult it is to put together that master schedule because they think it's just oh, it's just scheduling.

[04:20]

It's just calendaring. But really what you're doing is enterprise resource planning. That's how the rest of the world does this, where you're thinking about. teachers and facilities and students and even parents and curriculum things. And all of that goes into this logistical puzzle. And we talk to a lot of people who are deep into this.

[04:38]

I like to call them scheduling geeks who just love this puzzle. But it still takes hundreds and hundreds of hours sometimes to piece it together. And we think that not only can it be better and faster and more efficient, but we can also help kind of surface those strategic things that schools want to accomplish, especially around equity. We've actually noticed and we've talked to a lot of schools all around the country. And one of the things that really gets us motivated to fix this is there are a lot of students in high schools around the country that because of scheduling issues just aren't getting the classes they need to either graduate or be ready for college. And by the time somebody realizes that somebody's fallen through the cracks, it's too late.

[05:19]

They either have to do a ton of work in summer school, or they have to do an extra year, or maybe they just don't graduate at all already for college. And that's a big deal for us, that students are really falling through the cracks because of things that we just don't have technology or time to kind of get to.

[05:36] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I think especially when we think about students who are already behind and might need a section of a course that we didn't really prepare for them to need in 10th grade. We had them covered in 9th grade when they took it the first time. But honestly, that's where we lose a lot of kids is when they fall behind And then we don't have the ability to serve them just because of our schedule. So catch me up a little bit, Chris, on the state of the art in scheduling, because my mindset around this is very much magnets on a whiteboard. And since I'm kind of a software person, I take those magnets and I convert them to cells on an Excel table. But I know I'm woefully out of date technology wise.

[06:11]

So what's the state of the art on scheduling? How does this work?

[06:14] SPEAKER_01:

You know, what's hilarious is that What you just described is what 90% of the principals out there still do. And I even had one principal that we're working with who said, you want me to show you the new fangled way we do scheduling? And she showed me a spreadsheet and that was the new way. And what we found is that even though student information systems check the box for scheduling, it's really only about 25% of the process. It's usually just the last piece where the students are going in to the schedule. But all the earlier pieces where you're taking in course requests from students, where you're figuring out how many sections you need and classes you need, and then who's going to teach them and put them on that magnet board.

[06:54]

All of that is usually done offline. And so that's a huge opportunity for us to automate and digitize that process in a very modern software solution that's obviously in the cloud. You can access anytime, anywhere. And in particular, what we're interested in and what we're building are very flexible tools. So the tools that exist out there, or even when people do this offline, they do it in a very linear process. They go from one step to the next, and it's very difficult to go back to the step before it.

[07:23]

So a good example of that is when oftentimes you get down to the scheduling of students, you put it in the SIS, and you might find out that this works for 80% of your students. Well, you then have to go back into steps and figure out where all the conflicts are and all the pieces of the puzzle that didn't fit right, And we think that you can be able to do that as you build. So as you build your sections, why not be able to see exactly what all the course requests were and start to group kids in interesting ways and maybe group just a piece of them and then go on and figure out another piece of the puzzle around your staff and then group a piece of them. So you can imagine a much more flexible iterative process that is much more dynamic than it has been in the past. And we think that that's going to help people build more scenarios than they have in the past. The thing with that magnet board you mentioned is great because if you want to make a change, you've got to take something off the magnet board.

[08:16]

And then you can't really save what you did before unless maybe you took a picture of it. But then you have to refer back to the picture. And so imagine just being able to do different versions very quickly, model different scenarios and go, this one gets me part of the way there. But let's save that, put that aside and try another one. These are the things you can do when all the information's at your fingertips in the cloud, and it's very easy to kind of iterate throughout it. So that's just some of the things.

[08:39]

There's more.

[08:40] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, well, and I think that scenario idea is an important one because we tend to get one scenario figured out and then hope that that's good enough for everyone. And if it's not, we have to go back, like literally go back to the board. We kind of pull our hair out and maybe take a picture and say, okay, let's try this again. But often what we're optimizing for in that kind of scheduling scenario to go a little scheduling geek on our listeners here is we're optimizing for, for one particular constraint. Like for example, in, I think in my middle school, I taught middle school at the beginning of my career. And I think probably one of the big considerations there was band, you know, band is always one of those hard ones to schedule around.

[09:13]

Cause you gotta get every, you know, 70 kids have to be available. at the same time and you end up building the entire schedule around that one program and you might have five or ten programs that would all like to be the schedule, you know, have the schedule built around them. So how does that work in terms of what you put into the system in terms of variables? I assume you've got students and their course preferences, you've got teachers and their certification areas and then you need to get schedules out of that somehow. Talk to me a little bit more about how that works.

[09:42] SPEAKER_01:

Today, you know, we're still early stage as a company so We're just now getting a beta version of our product out there. We're working with about 12 different schools all across the country to be totally representative of every scenario you can imagine. So we're just getting started. And in the early days right now, we're not even really doing course requests in our system. We're taking those from either their SIS or spreadsheets in many cases, bringing that in, then going through the process of section planning and placement board and And then eventually getting down to the student piece, the automation piece. But one of the innovations that we've spent a lot of time on, and I think you'll appreciate this, is getting rid of the conflict matrix.

[10:22]

Do you remember the conflict matrix? The conflict matrix is that thing where after you figure out kind of a first draft of what your teachers want to teach or what you want them to teach and what period they go in and all that, you then usually print out all these reports. Sometimes it can be pages and pages of reports that says, this is why this won't work because these kids wanted this, et cetera. And what we're doing is we're getting rid of that step. We're literally, as you build, you can see the conflicts in real time and you can actually see specific students' conflicts in real time if you want so that you can actually make some changes in their schedules if you need to, to avoid fewer conflicts. And when you talk to principals, this is huge because it's, It's been a nightmare to have to go from the paper to the board to the digital tools, etc.

[11:08]

And to put that all in one place is really big. Another thing, though, that I think is really important in what we're doing is we're trying to make this much more of a transparent process. So there's tools in our platform that allow you to visualize and bring up all the schedules in any shape you want. So you want to bring up students of one type and teachers of another type, like a department or a grade level, You can visualize those in one layout. And as a result, you can have conversations with students and teachers in a way you couldn't have before. And we had one principal who, after we kind of visualized their master schedule like this, was able to actually have conversations with teachers and help them see the decisions that she was making in her schedule that they'd never had insight into before.

[11:54]

Because as you know, teachers often feel like they just got it dumped on them. And now we can actually say, well, here's the decisions that we made. And oh, by the way, do you want to make changes? Because they could actually log into the system and start to make their own schedules and make suggestions maybe by department, et cetera. And we think that that's really huge to building just a strong culture of collaboration amongst the staff.

[12:15] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I think especially when it becomes apparent that you need an extra section of something. You know, the math teacher who has to suddenly teach science in a grade level they've never taught science in before, it's like... Why me? Why are you doing this to me?

[12:28]

And I love that idea of transparency and really of tapping into the leadership that's likely there. I think every school has people who are not administrators who really have a knack for this kind of stuff and really would like to have input. So that's a neat ability there to be able to get input from different people.

[12:44] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. One of the things that's really big for us as we move forward in particular is also to take this concept of master scheduling from something that you do sort of once a year to prepare for next year. into something that happens every day. We know, I think you started by saying this, that schools are really complex places. And sort of what happens is we spend all this time working on the master schedule for the next year, and then the school year starts, and a lot of it gets thrown out the window. We have this little line where we say the master schedule is actually a lie.

[13:15]

And the reason is, is because when the school year starts, you change everything, right? It may be that some group of kids are out on a field trip, or that that assembly you need to do differently, or the specialist that was supposed to show up today really needs to come tomorrow, right? So a lot of things kind of change on the fly, and not to mention that schools, as they move towards more personalized, blended, competency-based learning, you actually want to change things on the fly. You want to regroup students. Maybe you regroup them daily. Maybe you group them every five weeks.

[13:47]

We're seeing a lot of schools really kind of think almost like reshuffling the master schedule every quarter or so. And so when you do that, you have to think more of scheduling as something that you do daily. And that's what we call dynamic school scheduling. And a very tangible example that we're seeing in schools all across the country And I think it's probably the easiest way for schools to step into personalization is with flex time blocks. I don't know if you, if you played with flex time blocks, but the idea is that maybe one hour a week it's unscheduled. And so in the master schedule, that just looks like an empty block.

[14:23]

The problem is, is every single week you need to fill it. And so how you fill it is you fill it by having dynamic tools that allow maybe students to select where they want to go, or maybe having teachers select where they want to put students. so that you can do things like genius hour, or interventions, or office hours, or whatever it is, and not just track where students are for attendance purposes, but then to have meaning behind it. So you can see the reports that these kids went there this many times over a week, and then make changes and suggestions. So if somebody's always going to the makerspace, you can say, well, it looks like you need some help in math. Why don't you come to office hours and schedule them really quickly?

[15:01]

And we think there's just a huge need for schools to have some simple tools that kind of do this. And quite frankly, we're seeing a lot of middle schools in particular latch onto this strategy as kind of their way, their nod towards more personalization of what kids need and student choice, which we're really excited about.

[15:16] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I've spoken with a number of people who have implemented like a pirate day. I don't know if you've heard of Dave Burgess's pirate day, you know, and logistically, that kind of thing can be, you know, can be pretty tough can take weeks and months of planning. So the idea of having some tools to kind of make that happen on the fly uh i think is is very appealing and i think especially at the middle school level where we're seeing increased attention to intervention and remediation and you know providing that support more quickly and as you said as you alluded to with flexible grouping making changes to the you know the the way that we're grouping students I mean, I think that was always my ideal as an elementary principal that we would regroup students, you know, depending on the book they were reading. And, you know, if a kid can, you know, get bumped up to a higher reading level, then absolutely being able to redo that because we don't want the grouping to be tracking, right?

[16:09]

We want to be able to differentiate instruction and teach students at their instructional level, but we don't want it to be, you know, like the redbirds and the bluebirds. We want that flexibility for kids to move and respond to the data in real time.

[16:20] SPEAKER_01:

It's interesting you mention that piece because we're working with one kind of very large urban school district. And the way they see scheduling is as a way to solve the equity problem. And so as you can imagine, a lot of students get shadow tracked. They're not officially tracked because we don't do that anymore, right? But maybe they were in ELL for a couple of years and they just got reclassified. And just sort of by the nature of how things work or maybe that the kids aren't pushing themselves, They get put in the low classes, right?

[16:52]

When there's no reason to think that a student who was still learning English can't do great in math or science or anything else. And so what they're hoping to use our tool for is to kind of end the shadow tracking, to be able to on the fly sort of push kids into new levels of expectations, right? And the only way you can do that is by getting in, seeing their data really easily, changing kind of some of their requests, and then grouping them and saying, okay, this group, this is a group of kids that we're going to push a little bit more. And we can quickly schedule them, right, and then go on to the next grouping. So these are some of the things that are really near and dear to our mission of wanting to really improve outcomes for all students using time as kind of the way into that.

[17:37] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I think that shadow tracking is a very real phenomenon. You know, not just, you know, is there an honors section that's putting all the kids who are in honors in science? You know, when I was a science teacher, we didn't have any kind of tracking in science, but the reality was that the kids who were in honors language arts together all came to science together. So I had some classes that basically could move twice as fast as other classes that had been...

[18:00]

composed as a consequence of that. And I think the long-term impact of that is that you have a very different educational experience. For a student who might be in exactly the same situation in terms of their learning, when you put kids into a de facto advanced class and a de facto not advanced class, that has a very big impact on what you can do with that class. So I think the ability to break that up a little bit, to consider that, and to look at, as you said, the kind of shadow of whatever else is going on, I think having some more tools would be great.

[18:34] SPEAKER_01:

And balancing properly, right? I mean, luckily, I think we've turned the corner in education where we're now valuing the diversity of different learners in one class. But for whatever reason, sometimes, like you just said, it gets overloaded with all the ELL kids or a lot of special ed kids. And And one of the things that we're visualizing in our tool is that as you explore classes and you assign students, you can actually see kind of the makeup of those sorts of different groups of kids better than you could before. So you can literally see how many ELL kids, how many special ed kids, how many math intervention kids are in one particular class. And if it looks out of balance to you, not to us, because we don't know what you consider to be out of balance, then you can quickly sort of make changes.

[19:19]

And so surfacing all that information in the schedule, I think is one highlight of how, if you really think about it, all data at some point has to go through the schedule. And we imagine a world where you can see different data points, even achievement scores, in your calendar of what kids are taking in their courses, and then quickly regroup them based on that data. And the reason for that is because at the end of the day, The school calendar and the school schedule is the way to operationalize everything in the school. It's one thing to have a data set that says these are the low-reading kids. It's another thing to say, what are you going to do with that information? Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put them in a different reading group or in a different class or whatever it is.

[20:07]

And that has to go through the schedule and the calendar. And that's why we're so bullish on time as sort of the center of all things in a school.

[20:14] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And I think it leads into so many other resource issues that we're responsible for as leaders. And you're talking about balancing a moment ago. But and I think that goes both ways, that sometimes we don't want to balance. Sometimes we want to be purposeful. You know, sometimes if we have four members.

[20:29]

kids who speak English as a second language and we have one instructional aid, well, that instructional aid is gonna have a really hard time if we split those kids up among four different classes, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying, okay, we're gonna have the aid in this class and we're gonna have all four kids in that class. And there's no problem that's created by that. And it's in fact a benefit to be able to support kids rather than having to do a pullout or, you know, there are lots of good instructional reasons why we might want to, you know, at least be aware of those factors or in some cases, as you said, kind of carefully manage them.

[20:59] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think you're hitting on a really important point, which is that every school has different priorities and thinks about it differently. And we firmly believe that every school truly is unique. But just because it's unique doesn't mean that we can't provide some tools that help them go in the direction that they want to go. And so we're really building a very flexible platform that says, look, if you think of it that way, then you can use our platform to achieve that goal. And if somebody thinks of it differently, they can still use our platform. So we're very, what we call model agnostic, right?

[21:31]

A lot of people build tools for one particular school model or school system. And we've been very careful to build something that's for everybody. And I mean, another example of that is, you know, you might have priorities around the academic composition of classes, but you also might want to prioritize something like teacher collaboration. I mean, teachers, that's one of the main things they ask for is more time to work with their colleagues to improve learning and their curriculum and so on. And that is something that you can easily do with our tool because we're not just looking at courses. We're looking at all the things around the courses, prep time, advisory time, different responsibilities you might have as a teacher.

[22:12]

And so as you do that, you can literally say this year I have X percent more collaboration time than I did last year because you can see that in our system. And the reason you can do that is we fundamentally are building our platform on time rather than courses. which is a very dramatic shift than how other tools out there, platforms out there have looked at this problem.

[22:35] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and let's talk more about the kind of timeline for the tools that you're developing. You said you're working with about 12 schools at the moment. And kind of where does it go from here?

[22:42] SPEAKER_01:

So we're kind of wrapping up scheduling season. As you know, most people kind of do scheduling at this time. Some do it in the summer as well. And that's why we've been really excited to work with a dozen schools, literally building our product for them as they build out their own schedules. So from here, we're going to have kind of finish out a version one of our product, which will be available for schools to start to use independently on their own in the fall. Of course, we know that most schools won't really come to have a heavy need for it until maybe February or so the spring of next year.

[23:15]

So that gives us plenty of time to not only finish out some additional features, but also spread the word. We're going to have a big launch of our products that if any of you are Principals out there who are listening will be at the National Principals Conference in Philadelphia in July, July 9th through 11th. We're a silver-level sponsor of that event. And we're hoping at that time to really just kind of spread the word about these new tools, about the power of scheduling, and get a kind of concerted sort of movement towards looking at time differently in schools. So that's kind of our big kickoff and launch. And of course, if anybody...

[23:50]

wants to meet us there and see what the product's about, we'd love to have them join us. And if people want to get an early even insight into what we're doing, they can go to our website today and request early access, which is kind of a late beta program where we won't handhold as many people. But if they want to go in and start to play around with the tool a little bit, we're letting people in kind of on a rolling basis. So those are all our next steps. But what we're really excited is long term is To even go beyond master scheduling, to start to build these tools that are more daily basis, what we call School Live, and eventually even build tools for districts and even students because we think that just time is such a rich area for us to innovate in. And it has tremendous value.

[24:33]

There's just a lot of work to do. So we'll be continuing to upgrade our master scheduling tools and roll out new products over the course of the next year or two.

[24:40] SPEAKER_02:

So the company is Able Always Be Learning. And the website is ablschools.com. And people can go there to sign up for early access. Chris, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[24:52] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's been great. Thanks so much for having us on. And we look forward to more conversations.

[24:59] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[25:04] SPEAKER_02:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation about scheduling with Chris Walsh? One thing I really appreciated that Chris highlighted over and over again is the idea of equity, that whenever we're making school-wide decisions, those decisions benefit some kids and might accidentally not benefit other kids. And we've got to really take that seriously. Obviously, we have to balance the consequences of any decision, and we do what's best for most of the kids most of the time. But what I think we need to be alert to and vigilant about is those kids that we're not able to serve as well as we would like to. If we build a master schedule that is fantastic for 90% of our students, that may be the best that we can do at the moment, but I think we never can forget those other 10% of students.

[25:52]

So we need to be asking ourselves, what can we do to better meet their needs. And today, we might not know. But I want to encourage you to keep the search up. And we can think of countless examples where technology or new instructional strategies or new leadership systems have really enabled us to serve kids that we were not able to effectively serve before. So my challenge to you, whether you are a classroom teacher and an aspiring administrator or a current administrator, or if you're in the ed tech sector, my challenge to you is never give up that question of whose interests are being served and how can we better serve the students that we're not serving well enough yet.

[26:33] Announcer:

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