Creating longer blocks for teacher planning

West Belden schedules non-teaching activities back-to-back to allow teachers to have blocks of common planning time.

West Belden combines their lunch and enrichment time to create 90-105 minutes of common planning time each day. This extended time allows teachers to meet with other teachers by content area (ex. Math or STEM), grade level (ex. 1st grade), and within multi-grade ranges (ex. 1st-3rd) throughout the week. Since there is a high degree of overlap among teachers and students, teachers thoroughly benefit from meeting with other teachers. The extended time allows them to review data together, share reflections on how students performed in previous days, adjust student learning paths as needed, share their lesson plans, and look for cross-curricular opportunities.