School calendars are often treated as inherited structures rather than pedagogical tools. The most obvious evidence for this is the long summer break which is purely a convention left over from when America was a largely agricultural society, in which students’ labor was needed in the fields. Yet over the past several decades, research in cognitive science and developmental psychology made clear that how instructional time is distributed across the year matters nearly as much as how much time is allocated.
Our academic calendar contains about 175 instructional days with 33-35 weekday days off distributed throughout the year, with a start–end window from mid-August to late May. As such it modifies the traditional model and intentionally integrates principles from research on learning, rest, and sustainability. When evaluated against the best-supported findings, our calendar performs strongly across 4 out 5 major dimensions which are 1) maximum uninterrupted instructional run; 2) length of longest learning break (think: summer break); 3) frequency of recovery breaks; 4) total annual instructional load; and 5) predictability and rhythm.
One of the most consistent findings in cognitive psychology is that learning follows a cycle of effort and recovery. Sustained cognitive work without adequate rest leads to diminishing returns: attention wanes, errors increase, and retention declines. Learning is more durable when instructional effort is broken into coherent blocks separated by meaningful breaks. Calendars that simply focus on the number of instructional days, say 180 in a cycle, but maintain long uninterrupted instructional runs degrade student and faculty performance.
I used ChatGPT to create a “hypothetical” calendar which comported with the current research, giving prompts for starting and ending dates and the number of total instructional days. Within a few minutes it produced a calendar that roughly approximated the one we actually created! ChatGPT “commended” our calendar as a significant improvement over traditional approaches, noting that:
“. . . instructional stretches are limited to eight or nine weeks before a meaningful break occurs. Fall break, Thanksgiving week, Christmas/New Year, winter break, spring break, and shorter spring pauses together create a rhythm that aligns closely with the research-supported recommendation of recovery every six to eight weeks. This alone places New Covenant’s calendar well above a standard traditional model and closer to balanced-calendar designs in terms of cognitive sustainability.”
A second finding pertains to the length of uninterrupted learning gaps, particularly with respect to forgetting. Summer learning loss begins to occur when more than three weeks pass without engagement, notably in mathematics and foreign language. Our longest breaks in the cycle occur at Thanksgiving and Christmas; nevertheless, they are under the threshold and remain positive. Our summer break, by contrast, reflects the older pattern which was based on agricultural concerns, and our students do experience learning loss. The way we compensate is to adjust our pedagogy in the first quarter of each year to provide thorough review to “pull forward” material that was taught the previous spring.
Equally important is the calendar’s effect on adults. Teacher effectiveness is not constant across the year; it declines under chronic overload and improves when teachers have predictable opportunities for rest. While our teachers benefit from the same breaks that are given to students, the calendar does not quite accommodate the time needed for regular meaningful professional and project development during the year. It is very difficult to meet student needs, while at the same time tackling the necessary tasks of curriculum update, development and a host of other routine improvements. We “steal” a half day before fall break and a whole day on Martin Luther King Jr. day for this purpose, but it is not nearly enough. Ideally—though not necessarily a “doable” solution —would be an approach that utilized the long summer break to absorb a balance of instructional days, while maintaining three-week breaks, and scheduled professional days. Such a calendar would lean toward a more year-round school model, which, I assure you, we are not contemplating at present.
Even so, as currently constructed our calendar comports with best practices that contemporary research supports. It reduces excessive instructional runs, provides regular recovery, maintains an efficient instructional load, and supports both student learning and adult sustainability.
