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Research shows that increasing the time teachers have to meet together in Common Planning Time — ideally to at least one ninety minute planning period per week — helps improve instruction by allowing teachers to share best practices, look at students' work, and plan curriculum and lessons together.
Varying class size can be a key strategic lever for improving instruction. Although class size reduction, especially in the early grades, can make measurable and lasting difference in student performance, achievement increases predictably only when class size nears 15 students. Research suggests that low class size make the most difference for students in high poverty schools. Raising class size in certain situtations can free resources for other investments to improve instruction.
Common Planning Time is most effective when teachers meet in teams that share common work usually subject and grade-level teams with agendas focused on student learning. The Common Planning Time page lets you see the effect that increasing Common Planning Time has on a district's budget.
DREAM allows you to adjust class sizes in order to meet district goals and student needs. Reducing class size alone, even by several students, noticeably increases a district's budget. The power of adjusting class size comes from making changes in the context of supporting high quality instruction through such strategies as Common Planning Time. For example, small increases in class size across the board, or increases in non-academic subject class sizes, may be used to fund more focused initiatives such as increases in Common Planning Time or reduction in early grade class sizes.
Your base case data is shown below in the gray fields. Please enter values into the yellow redesigned fields to experiment with changing current class size values and to see the impact on the numbers of teachers and total budget.
Please note that increasing Common Planning Time for teachers without changing anything else will noticeably increase the district's budget. Because Specialist teachers (e.g., Art, Music) are often responsible for students during a homeroom teacher's Common Planning Time, changing the class sizes of both homeroom classes and these special classes can provide a creative solution for increasing Common Planning Time without a large budget increase.
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