Robot created, as always. I had to plead with it a whole bunch to put some non-males in the scene.

Scheduler’s Little Helper

Something a bit different from recent posts

It’s scheduling season at work, which means that I’ve had very little time to do much else this week. I’ve written about scheduling quite a bit over the years, and I don’t think I have too much to add this time. Though, for the first time ever, I’m scheduling in concert with my other Instructional Coaches, which has been a very useful experience. They’re pretty great.

Because we were all going to be working on the schedule together, I thought I might spend a bit of time refining the tools that I use to help me get a coherent schedule for the department on the page. Having two other brains working on the project means that some of the unavoidable myopia that comes from solo scheduling is being taken care of this year. Aside from that, it has been my experience that the major errors come from the human technical side. I’m not sure I’ve ever made a draft schedule that didn’t have someone over- or under-prepped, or that scheduled the correct number of sections of a course right off the bat. To help us avoid similar whoopsies this year, I spent a bit of time getting my scheduling spreadsheet into something more user-friendly:

1. Wrong number of sections for a teacher? Conditional formatting!
2. Wrong number of sections of a class? Conditional formatting!