Pagosa Springs Elementary School: A Study of Teachers’ Collaborative Use of Time

Part of the SCOPE research series titled Time Matters: Teacher Collaboration for Learning and Leading, this case study looks at Pagosa Springs Elementary School, which is located in the Town of Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The school serves students in kindergarten through fourth grade and had an enrollment of 585 students for the 2016–17 school year. The school places an emphasis on the whole child, nurturing intellectual, social-emotional, physical, and artistic aspects of each child.

Pagosa Springs Elementary School completed the process to reorganize teacher time and work in the spring of 2014 and the staff members were in the third school year of implementation of the redesigned schedule at the time of this study. Innovative scheduling of teachers’ work and learning is still operative and plans were underway to improve the teachers’ collaborative practice for the 2017–2018 school year. In the meantime, teachers and students are reaping the benefits of collaborative practice. With reflection on their practice, there is reason to believe the teachers’ collaborative practice will become even more effective in improving their teaching quality and student learning.

This report is part of the SCOPE research series titled Time Matters: Teacher Collaboration for Learning and Leading and was prepared with generous support from the Ford Foundation. We gratefully acknowledge their support.