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How do we modify the registration process to gain a fuller picture of the student experience?

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Action Plan Template - 2.6 - Upper School Regristation (Updates 4.12).docx

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Class of 2021 Regristration Timeline.docx

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18-19 School Year - Class of 2019 Regristration Meetings.xlsx

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Has canvas increased and/or decreased the stress/anxiety of our student population?

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What is the impact of the daily schedule on the lives of our US students?

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How do we intentionally coordinate assessments and the workload of students?

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Our workgroup was not able to find any conclusive data to answer this question. We have some anecdotal information that, when used "correctly" and consistently, Canvas has been helpful for students.
We were unable to find any studies on increased stress with learning management systems like Canvas. Most of the studies showed that LMS are helpful to school/students.

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We did look into the idea of "turning off" Canvas between the hours of, say 12pm and 5am. This wasn't anything created a proposal/plan for, but we did look at certain companies (and France) that are turning off email to help create a better work-life balance in their settings. This might be something to be considered in the future. If we are going to say that student should be getting a full night sleep this would be an action item we could put behind this idea - though further brainstorming needs to occur to see if the intention of this would produce the impact we are hoping to accomplish.

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Times article on France turning off email

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Times article on France turning off email

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PARIS - If the world does not envy the French enough already for their generous vacations, universal health care and fine food and wine, the arrival of 2017 brings this: a newly created "right to disconnect."

Though ridiculed in some quarters as a ban on work-related email after hours, it is not quite that. But it is born of the enlightened view that it is actually beneficial for people not to work all the time, and that workers have the right to occasionally draw the line when their employer's demands intrude on evenings at home, treasured vacations or Sundays with friends and family.

"Employees are more and more connected during hours outside of the office," Myriam El Khomri, the minister of labor, said last year in justifying the need for the law.

"The boundary between professional and personal life has become tenuous," and cases of burnout are becoming more prevalent, she said.

The measure is one of a raft of new laws that took effect with the beginning of the new year and that exemplify the search for compromises between preserving French traditions and making concessions to the realities of the modern world.

The new provision in the labor law does not ban work-related emails, but does require that companies with more than 50 employees negotiate a new protocol to ensure that work does not spill into days off or after-work hours.

Some consultants have recommended that employees and managers avoid the "reply all" function on emails to groups so that only one person is being asked to read an email and respond, rather than half the office.

Another approach recommends setting a time each evening after which employees are not expected to reply - several firms have designated the 10 hours between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m., others the 12 hours between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m.

As a country with Catholic roots, but also a commitment to personal liberties, France has had an ambivalent approach to divorce. It has long been legal, but not necessarily speedy. A new nod to modernity in French laws eases the rules for people who want to divorce.

While historically France has been far more flexible than Ireland or Italy, it still required a judge to rule on each divorce. The procedure routinely took as long as a year, and sometimes far longer, because cases were backed up awaiting the judicial signature.

Now, if both members of the couple agree on the divorce, lawyers can draw up the divorce agreement, jointly sign the papers and have them notarized. No judges need be involved.

Smoking is another area in which French habits have changed relatively little in recent years - 27 to 28 percent of the population still lights up - but the country is now following many others in requiring "neutral packaging" for tobacco products: Instead of advertising a brand, cigarette packs sport only health warnings and photos of illnesses caused by smoking.

At least two new laws demonstrate the country's gradual move toward more sustainable products.

Instead of thin plastic bags, French supermarkets and fruit vendors must substitute either bags made with a plant-based synthetic called amidon that is mixed with plastic, a thicker type of plastic bag that could be reused, or paper bags. At Monoprix, a supermarket chain, paper bags have won out and stacks of them perch precariously on stands at the ends of fruit counters.

More radical is the edict that went into effect on Sunday banning the use of pesticides in public gardens and along public highways. It promises to make public green spaces safer for birds and other small animals, which are especially vulnerable to the poisons used in pest killers.

It will not be easy for the gardeners employed by cities to turn to more sustainable methods. When the city of Lyon abandoned pesticides voluntarily nine years ago, it took quite some time to change the culture, although Lyon is now considered a model.

In 2019, the antipesticide law will expand to include amateur gardeners - a challenge not only for the French with backyard rows of dahlias and daisies, but also for those who nurse roses in their window boxes.

A new food-related law is sure to please the French because it plays to their immense pride in local comestibles: It allows prepared foods, like frozen dinners, to be labeled "produit d'origine française" only if the item is made with 100 percent French meat or milk.

Any product with more than 8 percent foreign meat must say where the animal was born, raised and butchered. A product with more than 50 percent foreign milk must say where it was collected and turned into the product being sold. It seems that the French version of "Made in America" is "Raised in France."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: 'Right to Disconnect' From Work Email and Other Laws Go Into Effect in France. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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France Lets Workers Turn Off, Tune Out and Live Life

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PARIS - If the world does not envy the French enough already for their generous vacations, universal health care and fine food and wine, the arrival of 2017 brings this: a newly created "right to disconnect." Though ridiculed in some quarters as a ban on work-related email after hours, it is not quite that.

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We have a love-hate relationship with email. On one hand, we send over 108 billion email messages every day. On the other hand, most of us hate working our way through our inbox. Email takes up 23 percent of the average employee's workday, and that average employee sends or receives 112 emails per day.

When you look at these statistics, you begin to see email as a new form of knowledge pollution. In fact, that exact conclusion is one that Thierry Breton, CEO of the France-based information technology services firm Atos Origin, arrived at several years ago. Breton noticed that his employees seemed constantly distracted by the stream of emails they received each day. So, he took steps to eliminate what he believed were negative effects on company productivity.

In February 2011, Breton announced that he was banning email. In three years' time, he wanted Atos to be a "zero-email" company. "We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives," Breton said in a public statement released through Atos's website. "We are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution."

That statement seems surprising coming from the CEO of a technology company employing over 70,000 people in more than forty offices around the world. But perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising. As I write about in my new book, Under New Management, an increasing number of company leaders are outlawing or at least restricting email. And as a result, they're getting more done.

Breton himself had being using a zero-email philosophy well before he announced led Atos to ban it. He'd stopped using internal email nearly five years earlier because he found it hampered his productivity. Despite his seemingly radical thinking about email, Breton isn't exactly the model of a rogue start-up founder testing out wild new ways to work. He's a middle-aged former minister of finance for France and a former professor at Harvard Business School.

Atos's massive size would seem to preclude the banning of email, but in reality it was the size of the company that Breton saw as the reason for the communication bottleneck. Of course, Atos didn't ban electronic communication outright. Instead, the company built a social network for the entire enterprise. They organized the network around 7,500 open communities representing the various projects that required collaboration. However, conversations are not automatically interrupting employees by pinging their inbox. Instead, employees can choose to enter the discussion on their terms and their schedule.

While Atos still hasn't hit 0% email, the reduction efforts are working. The company has reduced overall email by 60 percent, going from an average of 100 email messages per week per employee to less than 40. Atos's operating margin increased from 6.5 percent to 7.5 percent in 2013, earnings per share rose by more than 50 percent, and administrative costs declined from 13 percent to 10 percent. Obviously, not all of these improvements were the result of banning email, but the correlation is certainly strong. So is a growing body of research on the effects of email.

Banning or putting restrictions on email, the research suggests, can dramatically increase individual productivity and reduce stress. Researchers from the University of California, Irvine and the U.S. Army cut off email usage for thirteen civilian office workers and measured the effects on productivity and stress. The researchers first took participants through a three-day baseline period in which they were interviewed and observed both visually and with computer monitoring software (to see how which programs they used, how often, and how much their work was interrupted). They even measured the participants' heart rates (as a proxy for stress levels). Then they pulled the plug on email, installing a filter on the participants' email program-which would file away all incoming messages for later reading and remove all notifications.

They continued the "no-email" condition for five days, continued to observe the participants, track their computer usage, and measure their heart rates. Participants began to communicate face-to-face and over the telephone more frequently. Most participants also spent significantly more time in each computer program that they used, suggesting that they were much less distracted. Judging by heart rates, participants also experienced significantly less stress when blocked from email. The participants even noticed this effect themselves. They consistently reported feeling more relaxed and focused, as well as more productive, with their email shut off than under normal working conditions.

Further studies suggest that just limiting email checking to a certain number of times per day or only checking the inbox at particular times can have almost as dramatic an effect.

Taken together, Atos' experience and the results of these studies suggest we need to have a conversation about when and how we email. Clearing out your email inbox can make you feel like you're ultra-productive, but unless your job description is solely to delete emails, you're likely just fooling yourself.

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Some Companies Are Banning Email and Getting More Done

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We have a love-hate relationship with email. On one hand, we send over 108 billion email messages every day. On the other hand, most of us hate working our way through our inbox. Email takes up 23 percent of the average employee's workday, and that average employee sends or receives 112 emails per day.

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New French Law Bars Work Email After Hours

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Workers and employers agree on long-term benefits.

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We were unable to find any evidence that block scheduling increases student stress. Most studies show that it reduces it. We talked about how it might be challenging if a teacher tried to teach an identical curriculum in fewer hours, but the small bit of research we found supported block scheduling.

The studies/articles we reviewed did not have a block schedule like our schedule. If folks have information/research, please pass it along.

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There is a lot of evidence that states that starting later is good for teens. Again, we didn't do a scientific study, but we agreed as a group that looking at the schedule and start times (especially with zero period) is something the school should look at.

A formal review of the schedule  (by a consultant or selected sub-committee) should occur after the institution has undergone their strategic planning session in May regarding "who are we as a school" / " what is our educational philosophy".

Questions that need to be answered through the schedule: What is the priorities of the institution?

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Action Plan Template - Major Test Calendar.docx

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Action Plan Template - Major Test Calendar.docx