WIN Time at Parkway Academy

By

Tony Sandoval, Justin Yaptangco, Alec Patton

PUBLISHED April 16, 2025

Tony Sandoval is a member of the CARE Middle Grades On-Track Network at HTHGSE.

In 2016, Parkway Sports and Health Science Academy, a public middle school in La Mesa, California, adopted a professional learning community (PLC) model. The goal was to enable staff to propose and decide on changes to their school in order to improve teaching practice and student learning. At the heart of PLCs are four questions:

What do students need to know, understand, and be able to do?
How will we know if they have learned it?
What will we do if a student has difficulty learning it?
What will we do if a student already knows it?

The intervention described in this piece was inspired by the third question, “What will we do if a student has difficulty learning it?” At Parkway, teachers were using formative assessments to identify students who were struggling to meet learning standards. But they were having trouble acting on this data, because the only time they could dedicate to helping students was their regular class period, which wasn’t long enough to offer targeted support. As a school, the Parkway faculty decided to carve out time from their daily schedule to pull specific groups of students to work on a particular skill or intervention. This led them to develop a version of What I Need (WIN) Time, a structure popularized by Stephanie McConnell that enables students to receive targeted support during the school day.

WIN Time 1.0

WIN Time at Parkway started with a few teachers experimenting. They dedicated a specific day to WIN Time with the idea that students who were identified as falling behind in specific areas would receive targeted support from teachers, and the rest of the student body could choose from a menu of enrichment activities such as art or sports, taking place at different locations around the school. Teachers would split up a class of kids, with one teacher providing interventions to a select group of students and the other teacher providing enrichments to the rest. This was not successful, for several reasons. First, there were a lot of students who were not scheduled to receive interventions, which resulted in students having nothing to do during the middle of the school day—a situation best avoided in middle school! Teachers also had to do a lot of extra work to create one-off enrichment activities, and it was a further challenge to align their classes, curriculum, and schedules. Despite their efforts, WIN Time was not very organized or productive for the students not receiving interventions. Parkway faculty wanted something that was more defined, where all students got time to work on “What I Need,” and receive support from staff. There was also the idea that students who were all caught up and doing well could have the gift of time to spend on something of their choice, read quietly, or just take a break. Staff began brainstorming what they could change and how they could implement WIN Time school-wide, with more advance planning.

WIN Time 2.0

For the second, more successful iteration of WIN Time, each class period was shortened by five minutes on Wednesdays and Thursdays, freeing up an extra 30 minutes on those days. This half hour became the WIN Time block. It took place twice per week after lunch, between periods 4 and 5. For WIN Time 2.0, the school built on an already established element of their schedule: the fact that each subject shared a common prep period. That is, all Parkway science teachers had prep at the same time, as did all math teachers, Language Arts teachers, etc. The shared preps would be used for WIN Time, which rotated through the subject areas week after week like so:

Week 1: Math WIN Time, Wednesday and Thursday
Week 2: Language Arts WIN Time, Wednesday and Thursday
Week 3: History WIN Time, Wednesday; Science WIN Time, Thursday
Week 4: Math WIN Time, Wednesday and Thursday
And so on…

WIN Time during a Language Arts week took place during second period (when Language Arts teachers have their prep) and looked something like this:

During WIN Time block after lunch, students go to their second period teacher.
In advance, Language Arts teachers notify students who need extra support (and share this list with all teachers). Selected students go to their Language Arts teachers instead of their second period teacher.
Students who are not identified for extra Language Arts support may use this time to catch up on work, read, or do whatever (non-disruptive) activity was of interest to them with their usual second period teacher.

In addition to the list of students who needed particular types of WIN Time, all teachers contributed to a separate document detailing the work that students had due for each class, so that teachers could help students figure out what to spend WIN Time on if they weren’t sure. WIN Time turned out to offer an additional benefit: if a teacher wanted to meet with a student who hadn’t been selected to receive official WIN Time support, they could give that student a note asking them to come see them during WIN Time, thereby being able to offer more targeted support to students. Using WIN Time, Parkway Middle School eliminated differences across student racial and socioeconomic groups in the number of students achieving As and Bs in core academic classes. In fact, it proved so successful that when Parkway Academy joined the CARE Network, a school network focused on increasing the number of eighth graders on track for high school success, the network adopted it as a signature practice. It is already improving outcomes at schools across southern California. Maybe your school can be next!

What Teachers and Students Say about WIN Time at Parkway

WIN Time has provided teachers time to pull a small group of students. Students who need extra support can be pulled for the teacher to reteach a topic, give students more time to complete an assignment, or give guidance on how to revise an assignment. Teachers can also pull a small group who is excelling to provide extensions to what they are learning.

—Melissa Hedgecock, 8th grade science teacher

WIN Time has helped me rethink many of my classroom procedures and activities based on the changing needs of our diverse group of students. Collected data from WIN Time lists also help inform me about what individuals may need further small group reteaching or reinforcement, or even just more frequent check-ins during class time.

—Patrick Martin, 8th grade science teacher

The mindset about WIN has changed from students thinking about it as a punishment to thinking about it as a positive experience. I have students ask if they can attend my WIN time. Even if it’s not a specified math WIN day, students will ask me if they can come to my class to get extra help with their math. I used to think of WIN as being only beneficial for me when it was specified for math, but I’ve evolved my thinking to understand that every WIN time, no matter the specified subject, is an opportunity to help as many students as possible with math.

—Jean Zelt, 8th grade math teacher

WIN Time gives teachers and students the “gift of time.” It’s not a study hall, because during my WIN Time week I get to select specific students for targeted, specific interventions based on data I am collecting in class: common formative assessments, test scores, or any other assessments we’ve done recently. Often, students self-advocate and ask to come to my WIN time because they want extra support. Another way I use WIN time is to preteach a concept or topic. Students that may be struggling can get a head start on a new unit, and I can get a sense of their background knowledge and build some basic understanding of what we will be learning.

—Tony Sandoval, 7th grade science teacher