The Enduring Benefits of Optimizing Learning Time

Sleep is a key ingredient in physical and mental health, and most adolescents aren’t getting enough-but a straightforward solution is within reach. The way we structure the school day and the time allocated for learning can have profound effects on students, teachers, and even parents. For decades, psychologists and other researchers have amassed evidence that later school start times can improve adolescents’ health and well-being. Emerging evidence suggests that pushing back the first bell can benefit teachers’ and parents’ sleep, too. By examining the impact of school schedules, the allocation of time within the school day, and the use of online learning platforms, we can uncover strategies to maximize educational outcomes and overall well-being.

The Critical Role of Sleep in Adolescent Development

Adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 should sleep 8 to 10 hours per day, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Few are logging those hours. Between 2009 and 2021, the percentage of high school students who did not get enough sleep increased from 69% to 77%, according to data from the CDC National Youth Risk Behavior Surveys. Many factors are at play in youth getting too little sleep, including heavy homework loads, overscheduled extracurriculars, and the irresistible lure of social media, which has been shown to impact adolescent sleep. Yet the biggest factors are biological. During puberty, youth undergo a shift in their circadian clocks. That shift makes it hard for teens to fall asleep until later in the night. Another factor at play is the sleep homeostatic system, which controls the rhythm of sleepiness and wakefulness. The longer you stay awake, the greater the pressure to sleep becomes. There’s evidence that during adolescence, that pressure takes longer to build. Those biological influences famously drive teens to sleep later in the morning. Neurological and psychological diagnoses only compound the problem. Sleep problems, including difficulties falling or staying asleep, are common in kids with autism and ADHD. Anxiety and depression can also skew sleep patterns. As rates of these conditions have increased, so has the number of kids coming to school bleary-eyed each morning.

Later School Start Times: A Simple Yet Powerful Intervention

Pushing back start times has a direct impact on how much kids sleep. It’s no surprise that teens wake up later when their school day starts later. Notably, though, they tend to go to bed around the same time-resulting in more time under the covers, as Meltzer, Wahlstrom, and colleagues showed in a longitudinal study. The downstream benefits are significant. had longer sleep duration, less negative mood, and better developmental outcomes including socioemotional health, cognitive development, behavioral health, and physical health. Another review found later start times were correlated with better attendance, less tardiness, less falling asleep in class, better grades, and fewer car crashes. “Adolescent health is significantly improved by having later start times,” Wahlstrom said, with reductions in substance use, suicidality, and depression. “This isn’t a silver bullet to improve test scores. Students aren’t the only ones to benefit from sleeping in. Meltzer and Wahlstrom found that after new school start times were implemented in a large suburban district near Denver, more parents of middle and high school students reported sufficient sleep duration, and fewer reported feeling tired. For their part, middle and high school teachers reported later wake times, increased sleep duration, and improved daytime functioning. It’s an important finding, given that many educators report feeling overstressed and under-rested, said Michelle Perfect, PhD, a professor of school psychology at the University of Arizona and past president of APA Division 16 (School Psychology). Her research has found that inadequate sleep duration and poor sleep quality are common among teachers. In a study not yet published, she tested teachers’ performance on a decision-making task in the lab. On the first task, teachers with poor sleep performed similarly to those who were better rested. But with each subsequent trial, their skills slipped. “By the fifth trial, they were only a few points away [on average] from a score consistent with early-stage dementia,” she said. “Teachers are making decisions constantly as they manage their classrooms. Despite the evidence that later start times have broad benefits, making the change can be complicated. To accommodate later starts for teenagers, most districts need to shift elementary start times earlier to balance busing schedules-a move that often gets pushback from families. In general, though, it’s easier for young kids to get used to going to bed and waking up earlier, since they don’t have the biological pressures of puberty fueling their sleep drive. Moreover, while teens benefit from later start times, elementary students don’t seem to suffer negative effects from earlier schedules, Meltzer said. Families also have concerns about how new start times might impact after-school schedules. Districts may need to get creative, adjusting sports timetables when playing districts on different schedules and rearranging the child-care offerings available before and after school. But districts that have made the switch have risen to those challenges, Meltzer said, and her research shows that later start times haven’t been found to significantly interfere with teens participating in extracurricular activities or holding after-school jobs.

Overcoming Obstacles to Change

In the past 25 years, more than 500 individual school districts in the United States have moved school start times later in response to the research, said Kyla Wahlstrom, PhD, an educational policy researcher at the University of Minnesota, who has been studying start times since the 1990s. Yet opposition to changing established start times can be surprisingly fierce. “There are always roadblocks. Change is hard,” said Lisa Meltzer, PhD, a pediatric sleep psychologist with Nyxeos Consulting and a professor at National Jewish Health in Denver. But the evidence is clear, she adds. School start times alone won’t solve the problem of too many young people getting too little sleep. “We need to pay attention to both ends of the sleep cycle-what’s happening in the morning, but after school as well,” said Mary Carskadon, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior who studies circadian rhythms at Brown University. Until society does a better job prioritizing sleep, Carskadon said, kids will continue to be under-rested. But in the meantime, changing school start times will be the single biggest way to help the greatest number of adolescents get the rest they need to thrive, Meltzer added. And research findings will continue to help school boards and governments get on board with the change. With more than 27,000 public and private secondary schools in the United States, those efforts will take time. But the impact of later school start times is evident, and youth deserve the chance for better health, Meltzer said. “There are problems that have to be solved, but they’re solvable.

The Benefits of an Extended School Day

Instead of narrowing the school curriculum to focus on reading and math, the new school day opens up the range of subjects students study and get exposure to. In new day schools, students explore music and the arts, a remarkable variety of enrichment activities, as well as a range of programs in social and emotional learning. All these activities contribute mightily to helping children receive a truly well-rounded education. The new school day also produces that most elusive of academic results: striking improvements in test scores. In Massachusetts, after just one year of the Expanded Learning Time Initiative, which added 30 percent (about two hours) to a redesigned school day in ten urban elementary and middle schools, the ELT schools not only improved their own performance; they improved faster than the rest of the state. Measured against statewide averages, the ten ELT schools began to make progress in the single most difficult task in public education these days: closing the achievement gap.

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Maximizing Time on Task

Nothing considered by itself is enough to turn schools around not the most gifted teachers, most inspiring principals, newest buildings, or most up-to-date equipment. Time, however, is an indispensable foundation for new levels of student achievement and educational success. And, like any precious resource, it can be wasted. In effective new day schools, teachers and principals talk constantly about how to make best use of time. They wrestle with finding the best ways to apply more time in core academic subjects, to help teachers incorporate more individualized instruction and project-based learning into their classes, and to balance added core academic time with more time for engaging enrichment in arts, music, drama, sports, and other essential aspects of a well-rounded education. They discuss and debate how to use data to inform their initial redesign plan for expanded time and then how to modify their approaches based on subsequent data. They work to balance added time for students with added time for teachers to work and plan together and to benefit from professional development. They blend more time for current teachers with the addition of time and services from outside individuals and community-based organizations. When well used, added time bestows many blessings. Principals don’t have to choose between math and social studies, between reading practice and science, or between core academics and arts, music, drama, or sports. Because the school day isn’t so rushed, they’re having fewer disciplinary problems and seeing fewer special education referrals. Kids are getting more opportunities and more choices for enrichment than ever before. A genuinely new school schedule uses significantly more time ideally about two hours a day to redesign the entire school schedule. In this book we take you inside new day classrooms to show how children are using the new schedule to ask questions and to learn actively through projects, experiments, and hands-on use of newly gained skills. Children occasionally grumble about the new schedule at first, but the evidence is that they soon some to accept it. Some, surprisingly enough, downright love it. “The teachers answer my questions,” kids of all ages say over and over. In one school that had begun the expanded schedule, the district had a funding crunch and reverted to the old schedule. Kids demonstrated in favor of keeping the new school day at the School Board meeting!

Experiential Learning and Teacher Collaboration

An expanded school schedule engages students more fully, and children learn better in a more stimulating environment. By reducing the pressure on the system to cram math and reading and science into too few hours, the new school day opens up the schedule for subjects that students enjoy and teachers like to teach. First, students and teachers get more time on task. Students who fall behind get the time to catch up. Instead of experiencing the classroom as a place for failure and boredom, kids have success. Students who are already keeping up have a chance to explore more. In science, longer classes allow students to carry out experiments from beginning to end in a single session. As one social studies teacher mourned after her school canceled the new school day for budget reasons, “The amount of material I could get through was amazing. You could introduce a concept, introduce primary sources to study it, have kids explore it in a group, and then come back and discuss the subject more in detail.” Students get more opportunities for experiential learning and enrichment activities. Arts, music, drama, and recessmost of which have been reduced or eliminated in recent years on behalf of so-called core academic subjectsreturn to the classroom. Longer periods enable teachers to divide the class into groups, and to make room for individual and small-group tutoringand more students stay more engaged, rather than drifting off into inattention and eventual disciplinary problems and failure. Schools restore academic subjects that had been scaled back or even dropped due to the emphasis on core instruction and high-stakes testing in reading, writing, and math. Students are able to study crucial academic subjects such as science, history, social studies, and foreign languages. Finally, teachers have time to work with each other in planning how they teach their students, time that almost never exists in the current school schedule.

Online Learning Platforms: A Flexible Approach

Time4Learning is committed to providing homeschoolers with the absolute best in online learning and support. Their products provide fun, engaging, and effective learning for students while alleviating burden from parents. While primarily focused on homeschool needs, the company’s comprehensive curriculum is also suited to after-school skill building and summer study, covering the core areas of language arts, math, science, and social studies, as well as a variety of electives. Time4Learning has experienced nearly a 3X growth in year-over-year student signups. Time4Learning offers homeschooling solutions designed to empower children with special needs.

Tailoring Education to Individual Needs

As a parent, you want to ensure that your child with special needs engages with learning in a way that suits their abilities. Dyslexic kids often need extra time to process and understand information. The platform offers audio components that can read instructions and lesson content aloud. Lessons are highly visual, incorporating images, charts, and videos to explain concepts. Time4Learning allows parents and teachers to track a learner’s progress through the curriculum. The program offers assessments in a low-pressure environment without the stress of traditional testing. Audiobooks allow children with dyslexia to enjoy reading material without struggling through the text. Autistic kids may require extra time to process information. Time4Learning uses colorful visuals, animations, and interactive activities that cater to the learning styles of kids with autism. Autistic kids often thrive in environments with clear routines and structure. Time4Learning provides a consistent and predictable framework, with clearly defined lessons and activities that follow a logical sequence. Time4Learning integrates a multisensory approach by combining visual, auditory, and interactive elements in lessons. Time4Learning offers quizzes and assessments in a low-pressure, flexible format, which is beneficial for kids with autism who may struggle with traditional testing environments. Kids with down syndrome often benefit from a slower, more deliberate pace of learning. Lessons are highly visual and interactive, with animations, videos, and colorful graphics. Kids with ADHD often benefit from a predictable routine. Time4Learning provides instant feedback on quizzes and activities, which is crucial for kids with ADHD who benefit from knowing how they are doing in real-time. Time4Learning allows for natural pauses between lessons and activities, giving kids the opportunity to take breaks as needed.

Flexibility and Customization

Time4Learning lets parents control their child's learning schedule and approach. Our comprehensive preschool curriculum gives students a solid foundation in all core areas through fun stories, characters, and interactive activities in math, language arts, science, and social studies. The elementary K-5th grade curriculum consists of standards-based language arts and math, and social studies and science for most grade levels. Time4MathFacts, our elementary-level math learning game collection, is also included for free! Our standards-based middle school curriculum covers math and language arts, as well as options to personalize science and social studies coursework. You can select up to 3 middle school electives for students in grades 6-8. Additional electives can be purchased for $5.00 per course, per month. Time4Learning’s standards-aligned high school curriculum consists of the primary subjects of language arts, math, science, and social studies.

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