Resource
Building schedules for remote community educators in 5 steps
We define community educators as talented adults from the broader community who bring additional capacity, insight and expertise to classrooms. They include working professionals, retirees, veterans, former educators, family members and others with valuable skills who can support the efforts of educators. They may be part-time or full-time, paid or unpaid.
As schools build teams of educators with distributed expertise, and especially as they increase the number of community educators on their teams, scheduling becomes an increasingly complex task. Here, you’ll find five actionable steps for building schedules for remote community educators that are responsive to student and team needs and maximize community educators’ skills and talents. At a high level, those steps are:
- Define desired roles
- Identify time slots
- Identify team-level needs
- Inventory community educators’ availability and skill sets
- Build out schedules.
You’ll also find a link to a customizable Google Sheet that will support you as you begin the process of scheduling community educators at your own school site.
Finally, note that while our recommendations are framed at the school level, they could easily be adapted to grade-level teams, multi-grade teams and cross-grade departmental teams.