S2, Ep5: Reimagining Seat Time and the Traditional School Bell Schedule, Part 2

05/16/23 • 27 min

In this episode, Robert Balfanz continues the conversation with New Hampshire’s Extended Learning Opportunity Network’s Kerrie Alley-Violette and Sean Peschel, two on-the-ground educators working to make “learning anywhere, anytime” real.

At the time when the sources and locations of knowledge and training have multiplied exponentially, innovative efforts like New Hampshire’s ELO Network help break seat time requirements, drawing on the realization that learning is not determined by the amount of time a student spends in a classroom, but rather occurs both in school and through experiences outside of schools. What Kerrie and Sean’s groundbreaking work shows is that challenging seat time is being done—and thus that it can be done.

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S2 Ep4: Reimagining Seat Time and the Traditional School Bell Schedule, Part 1

When teams of educators, students, and community members across the nation work to redesign high schools, one thing that repeatedly stands in the way is the school schedule and the need to meet seat time requirements. There is no better example of how the 20th Century designed high school no longer works in the 21st century than seat time. It is based in the idea that how much you learn is determined by how long you spend sitting in a classroom and originated at the turn of the 20th century as it means to standardize student learning experiences.

A hundred years later, the standards and accountability of credit students needed to graduate remains largely the same, and this essentially leaves no flexibility in a student's schedule for any form of experiential or out-of-school learning. At the time when the sources and location of knowledge and training have multiplied exponentially, it is the innovative efforts like New Hampshire's Extended Learning Opportunity Network that helps to break the gridlock of seat time requirements.

In this episode, Robert Balfanz is joined by Kerrie Alley-Violette, ELO coordinator of the Sanborn Regional High School and president of the ELO Network, and Sean Peschel, ELO coordinator at Oyster River High School and vice president of the ELO Network to discuss the innovative work happening in New Hampshire.

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Season2, Ep6: Designing an Education System That Works for All Students

Celebrating its one-year anniversary, the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS), a partnership between the U.S. Department of Education, AmeriCorps, and the Johns Hopkins Everyone Graduates Center, was launched following a call to action from the Biden-Harris Administration for more Americans to serve as tutors, mentors, college/career advisors, student success coaches, and integrated student support coordinators to provide young people with supportive learning environments and experiences that will support them to recover from the impacts of the pandemic and thrive.

In Season Two’s sixth episode, Cindy Marten, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education, joins Robert Balfanz for a conversation about how local innovation, K-12 and higher education collaboration, NPSS, and federal education policy all have key roles to play in enabling design of an education system that works for all students.

Designing Education - S2, Ep5: Reimagining Seat Time and the Traditional School Bell Schedule, Part 2

Transcript

Robert Balfanz:

Hello, and welcome to the Designing Education podcast. Today we're picking up where we left off in our last conversation with Kerrie Alley-Violette and Sean Peschel, and talking more about New Hampshire's Extended Learning Opportunities effort and what it takes to implement it well. We can't wait to jump in, but before we start, we want to take a moment to remind you to subscribe to the Designing Education podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and never miss an episode.