By Alyson Klein
School and district leaders love using research to decide which curriculum to adopt or what kind of professional development to offer. But educators—and professionals in just about every other field—often ignore research when it comes to thinking through how to use another precious resource: Time.
In fact, almost everyone, including K-12 leaders, think timing and scheduling is an “art,” said Daniel Pink, the best-selling author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. But really, it’s a “science.”
That’s the message Pink delivered to K-12 district leaders at Education Week’s Leaders to Learn From event this month. And it is a message he will likely continue repeating until people start paying attention.
“When we make our timing decisions we tend to make them based on intuition,” Pink said. “We tend to make them based on guess work. That’s the wrong way to do it. We should be making them based on evidence.”