A New Schedule for Rivers: Centering Student Needs Through Design Thinking and Empathy Research

Last year’s self-study as part of the AISNE accreditation process helped prompt the redesign, and so did Rivers’ new strategic plan. “In a fundamental way, [a school schedule] really sets the priorities of the school, because it dictates how much time we’re going to spend as a community on different activities with our students and how we’re going to pace that through a week, a month, a year,” says Chris Dalton, dean of academics and institutional research at Rivers. 

One pillar of the new strategic plan calls for an emphasis on student wellness and belonging, and another focuses on shaping students for lives of impact and purpose. “A schedule can’t make you experience belonging, but it can make it easier or harder to do that,” says Dalton. “So, if we’re trying to be a school that enables students to have learning that feels purposeful and connected to who they’re becoming, then there are certain types of structures that can help, and some that can get in the way.” 

Dean of Faculty Andrea Diaz emphasizes that the schedule redesign is also an opportunity to support programming that has grown in the years since the current schedule was set. Special programs such as McCartney Scholars, the Special Program in Bioethics, and the Creative Writing Program, among others, were not part of the landscape in 2011, when the present-day schedule was designed. 

For several years, Dalton says, community members have raised ideas to better the student experience. “Until now, we haven’t been able to make those changes, because the schedule is so interconnected that any change to impact one domain would also impact all the other domains,” Dalton explains. A comprehensive, holistic approach is necessary in order to meaningfully improve the day-to-day schedule at Rivers. 

For this important work, Rivers has partnered with Antonio Viva from the consulting firm Leadership + Design. Throughout the redesign process, Viva has worked with the redesign steering committee, composed of Dalton, Andrea Diaz, Victoria Mizzi, Sarah Heffrin, and Melissa Dolan ’98, and the design team, which includes members of the steering committee and a cross-divisional group of educators: Diane DeVore, Ellie Strayer, Julia Auster-Hogan ’06, Emily Samperi, Josh Shaller, Krissy Skare, Maddy Smith, Mallory Rome, Zaidi Barreto, Kim Webster, Sadie Peña, and Sophie Lane. 

Each month of this academic year, the combined teams have gathered for a full-day immersive workshop with Viva to synthesize research and generate creative solutions that fit Rivers. Viva has led the Rivers team to use the principles of design thinking in their development process, following five steps: empathize, define needs, ideate, prototype, and test. 

“Many people, when they think about schedule design, want to pull out their Excel spreadsheet or grab a piece of paper and start drawing boxes and adding time labels,” says Dalton. “And what I love about this process is that, even after three months of research on the schedule, we have not drawn a single box, because we’re focused on understanding the needs and the values that are going to be at the core of the schedule, before we start getting into the nuts and bolts of how we’re going to make the time reflect those needs and values.”

As part of the first step in the design-thinking process, “empathize,” the design team conducted “empathy research.”  Each member of the team shadowed a Rivers student for a full day in September, gaining insight into the daily cadence of students’ varied course and extracurricular schedules. 

Dalton, who serves as the liaison between the Rivers team and Viva, says shadowing students was key to the student-focused methodology the team is taking. “It’s completely different when someone who’s going to be participating in the design of the schedule has actually sat in a chair in the classroom at 8:30 in the morning, or felt the hunger of waiting for lunch that’s later than usual. That person is going to really appreciate and be able to think about how to solve that problem differently than somebody looking at a spreadsheet of survey results.”

More than 30 professional community members also contributed to the research by keeping time journals about their days, which helped the design team to understand key pressure points and live the schedule through a variety of perspectives.

Heffrin, who oversees student wellness in the Middle School as Middle School dean of student life, says, “One of the things that came through is that sometimes a student can have a really easy day and sometimes they can have a really hard day, depending on how the schedule is.” That imbalance, she says, is the kind of thing that can strain a student’s schedule, week after week.

Following the empathy research, the team moved on to defining needs. The team observed that students and professional community members alike often struggle to find ample time for collaboration, meetings, and special programming, especially with lunch blocks doubling as program blocks and teaching blocks. So, one goal is to build in more time for collaboration throughout the day. Another goal is to build in blocks of time when students can access learning resources and support without feeling they were sacrificing lunch or time for meeting as affinity groups.

“One of the main things we learned is that our schedule is really inconsistent. Lunches happen at different times. Classes start at something like 27 different times,” says Dalton. A consistent start time and predictable rhythm are also priorities in the design process. 

In the “ideate” phase, the team dove into research on design principles and examined the features of a variety of schedules from other independent schools. Then, in December, the team pulled together all the research so far and the list of needs for the school and designed four prototype schedules—each with a Middle School and Upper School model—which were presented to the community in January. It’s important to note that the prototypes presented are just initial ideas, and that the prototype phase is not the final stage in the process. Prototypes are in conversation with ideas and serve as thinking tools, but by definition, they are incomplete.

“We’re being really open-minded about options, which is why prototyping is a great way to innovate, because you can get feedback on how certain ideas might work. So, it’s a process that provides a lot of opportunity for the best ideas to win out, and the ideas that will best help students to win out,” says Dalton. Heffrin adds that there is no one perfect schedule that will appeal to everyone, but that every feature of each prototype was meticulously planned and researched. 

The prototypes were reviewed by groups of students, cross-divisional focus groups of professional community members, and program-specific focus groups with admission, the equity and engagement team, student life, counseling and wellness, learning services, athletics, and the performing arts. 

Participants were encouraged to look at each prototype with curiosity and to consider how it would feel to live and learn or teach within them. Each model put forward new features as  solutions to existing problems, such as a longer lunch block so that lunch time can also be used for deeper project work, a rotating block schedule to allow for variety between weeks, consistent start times of classes throughout the week, and an “X” block built into the block schedule to give special programs more time to meet. 

“It’s hard to think about time because what you don’t want is the schedule to drive experiences,” says Viva, who has gone through this process with many schools. “You want experiences to drive the schedule.” That leads to important questions, such as, “‘What experience does Rivers want to design for kids?’ And ‘how does the schedule facilitate that?’” he says. “It’s a very different way of thinking.” 

Victoria Mizzi, who has experience serving as a class dean and as interim dean of student life, says she appreciates the feedback she has heard so far from professional community focus groups. “More people were excited than apprehensive,” she says. “I think people understand that this is really about students, even though some of the prototypes will have issues to work through. But I think everyone understood that we had the needs of the student at the forefront of our minds as we were coming up with these prototypes.” 

Following the prototype phase, the team will move on to “hard testing”. The team will iterate the design possibilities through higher-fidelity prototypes based on feedback from the community. The steering committee and design team will present a final decision before the March break. Even with a final schedule chosen, there will inevitably be tweaks and changes as the schedule is adapted to better support students’ needs.

“Change is hard because the schedule impacts everyone in our community, and everyone will be impacted to different degrees,” Dalton acknowledges. “What we’re aspiring to do is make sure our schedule is aligned with our mission and values and best supports our student experience.”