With sum­mer draw­ing to a close and schools start­ing up for a new sea­son, what bet­ter time to take a look at how schools uti­lize research about the brain in deter­min­ing the tim­ing of the flow of school. Not only cur­rent brain research, but com­mon sense, tells me the fol­low­ing areas need tweaking.

• - School start times and sleep
• - Expo­sure to nat­ural light
• - Sched­ul­ing of classes

SCHOOL START TIMES AND SLEEP
Left to your own devices, what time would you go to sleep each evening and what time would you wake up? As adults, it is likely that exter­nal respon­si­bil­i­ties deter­mine your wake time, and the matu­rity of age guides your sleep time. More often than not, thanks to a sound night’s sleep, you wake men­tally refreshed and pre­pared to face the day. Teenagers are sim­ply out of luck in this realm.

Mela­tonin is respon­si­ble for our body rhythms, also known as cir­ca­dian rhythms. These sleep/wake cycles are directly influ­enced by our expo­sure to light. As dark­ness sets in, mela­tonin is released, pro­mot­ing the urge to go to sleep. Teenagers usu­ally release mela­tonin at later times in the evening so they tend to fall asleep later and wake up later.

Notice, there is no “early” in that last sen­tence, and the result is that teenage cir­ca­dian rhythms are often out of synch with school start times. The National Sleep Foun­da­tion has found that school start times should be altered to accom­mo­date teenagers, with the antic­i­pa­tion that bet­ter qual­ity sleep will pro­mote health­ful pat­terns, result­ing in more ben­e­fi­cial learn­ing environments.

EXPOSURE TO NATURAL LIGHT
Light and dark do more than impact our cir­ca­dian rhythms. Light also influ­ences our moods. SAD (Sea­sonal Affec­tive Dis­or­der) results from insuf­fi­cient expo­sure to sun­light in the fall and win­ter months. Research has shown that nat­ural light has a con­sis­tent and pre­dictable pos­i­tive effect on stu­dent performance.

When my sev­en­teen year old was in mid­dle school, he astutely noted that dur­ing the best hours of win­ter day­light, stu­dents were kept indoors. While it may not be prac­ti­cal to retro fit school build­ings so that nat­ural light per­me­ates every class­room, when cou­pled with the ben­e­fits of exer­cise, the ben­e­fits of every stu­dent hav­ing out­door recess would go a long way toward alle­vi­at­ing SAD and wak­ing up neurons.

SCHEDULING OF CLASSES
Okay, so they are out of bed and in school, though they may be yawn­ing through the morn­ing. Now they have to fol­low the sched­ule of classes. Research has shown that in mid­dle schools the best type of class sched­ule is one that incor­po­rates longer seg­ments of time. How many schools do you know of that tend to sched­ule classes that last longer than 45 minutes?

Not only could the daily class sched­ule have flex­i­ble chunks of time, but the yearly school sched­ule could also be designed to bet­ter accom­mo­date the diver­sity of stu­dent learn­ers. The Cen­ter for Pub­lic Edu­ca­tion takes an in-depth look at What research says about reor­ga­niz­ing school sched­ules in this 2006 posting.

If you know of exam­ples or have expe­ri­ences that sup­port or refute these sug­ges­tions, please share them! And please note that my per­spec­tive is based on teach­ing mid­dle and high school stu­dents for the past ten years, and also hav­ing taught at schools that had flex­i­ble sched­ul­ing blocks.

For addi­tional infor­ma­tion related to these topics:

• - The Oper­a­tion of the Flex­i­ble All-Year School Plan
• - School: The Story of Amer­i­can Pub­lic Education

Lau­rie Bar­tels writes the Neu­rons Fir­ing blog to cre­ate for her­self the “the grad­u­ate course I’d love to take if it existed as a pro­gram”. She is the K-8 Com­puter Coor­di­na­tor and Tech­nol­ogy Train­ing Coor­di­na­tor at Rye Coun­try Day School in Rye, New York. She is also the orga­nizer of Dig­i­tal Wave annual sum­mer pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment, and a fre­quent attendee of Learn­ing & The Brain conferences.

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