Unlock the Learning Gap: The Power of WIN Time

Recently, on my podcast Unpacking the Backpack, I dove into the concept of "WIN Time," or "What I Need Time." This idea is a powerful pedagogical shift designed to empower students and personalize learning. It's an essential component of reimagining how schools function. So, what exactly is WIN Time? At its core, it's a dedicated, flexible block of time built into the school day where students receive targeted support or enrichment based on their individual academic needs. It moves away from a one-size-fits-all approach and instead asks the critical question: "What does this specific student need right now to succeed?". This is something we discuss in detail in Personalize. 

Imagine a traditional classroom setting. Some students grasp concepts quickly, while others struggle with foundational skills. In a typical lesson, both groups move forward at the same pace, often leaving one group bored and disengaged, and the other increasingly frustrated and left behind. WIN Time is designed precisely to bridge this gap. It's a structured mechanism for immediate intervention for those who need extra help, a challenging extension for those who are ready for more, and fundamentally, a space for students to take ownership of their learning journey.

It's important to stress that WIN Time isn't simply about remediation; it’s about personalization on a grand scale. It acknowledges that learning is not linear and that every student's path is unique. This means identifying specific academic gaps through timely data, offering opportunities for advanced study, or even providing time for students to pursue passion projects related to their curriculum.

The Educational Imperative: Why We Need WIN Time

Why is a structured intervention time so crucial in today's educational landscape? The fundamental argument is that we need to move beyond simply covering content and instead focus on ensuring mastery. Traditional models often push students forward regardless of their depth of understanding, leading to cumulative, unaddressed gaps that become increasingly difficult to close as students progress through grades. WIN Time directly addresses this by providing a mechanism for timely and specific intervention.

Consider the data on learning gaps. When students consistently struggle with a concept, and those struggles are not addressed immediately, the gap between what they know and what they need to know widens exponentially. This leads to decreased confidence, significant disengagement, and ultimately, a disservice to the learner. WIN Time allows educators to be proactive, identifying struggles early and providing immediate, targeted support. This practice is about developing a growth mindset and building resilient, self-aware learners, not just improving a standardized test score.

Furthermore, implementing this dedicated time promotes student agency. Instead of being passive recipients of information, students become active participants in identifying their needs and pursuing their learning goals. They learn to self-assess, advocate for themselves, understand precisely where they need help, and seek out appropriate resources. This skill—self-advocacy—is a critical life skill that extends far beyond the classroom walls.

Overcoming Implementation Challenges

Adopting a flexible block like WIN Time is not without its challenges. One of the primary hurdles schools face is scheduling. How do you carve out a 30-to-45-minute dedicated block in an already packed school day? This often requires a willingness to critically rethink traditional schedules, perhaps by adjusting bell times, reallocating existing advisory periods, or modifying the length of core subject blocks. It demands a high degree of collaboration among all staff members and a shared commitment to the philosophy behind personalized support.

Another significant challenge is data collection and diagnosis. Identifying student needs effectively requires robust, ongoing formative assessment practices. Teachers need reliable, up-to-the-minute data to accurately determine who needs intervention, who needs enrichment, and the specific areas that require attention. This means embracing a continuous cycle of assessment, rapid analysis, and responsive, targeted instruction. We must move beyond reliance on delayed, summative tests.

Finally, there's the question of staffing and resources. Who facilitates this time? What specific materials are needed? While teachers are ideally equipped to provide differentiated instruction within their own classrooms, there are opportunities to leverage support from specialists, counselors, or even trained peer mentors to contribute. The key is to organize and utilize all available resources efficiently to create a rich and supportive learning environment that maximizes the time.

Practical Applications: What WIN Time Looks Like

Now, let's look at the practical application. What does a successful WIN Time model actually look like in a school setting? Data is used to enhance the teaching and learning process through a variety of pathways:

• Teacher teams sharing learners: Students might be assigned to different "WIN groups" based on current academic performance and diagnostic data; these assignments must be fluid and change week to week.

• Station rotation: Read more HERE.
• Modified rotations: Read more HERE.
• Must-do / may-do: Read more HERE.
• Playlists: Read more HERE.
• Choice boards: Read more HERE.

Below you can see how the above strategies connect to RTI (Tier 2 and 3 suppport).

The true strength of this approach is its flexibility. It is not a rigid program but a dynamic framework that can and should be adapted to the unique context of each school, its population, and its curriculum structure.

The Transformative Potential

When implemented effectively, the results of this focused, personalized learning time can be truly transformative for student outcomes.

• Improved Academic Performance: By providing highly targeted support exactly when it's needed, students close academic gaps more quickly, leading to improved understanding and higher achievement across all subjects.
• Increased Student Engagement: When learning is personalized, relevant, and directly addresses a student's current challenge or interest, they are far more likely to be engaged and motivated. They feel seen, heard, and actively supported.
• Enhanced Self-Efficacy: As students repeatedly experience success through focused effort and take ownership of their learning path, their confidence and belief in their own ability to learn grow significantly.
• Development of Competencies: This protected time naturally develops and refines critical competencies like critical thinking, self-regulation, problem-solving, focused collaboration, and, most importantly, self-advocacy.

WIN Time is about more than making incremental improvements; it's about fundamentally rethinking what school can be. It challenges the traditional rigid model of education and moves us towards a more student-centered, agile, and responsive approach. It is a powerful structural commitment to equity, ensuring that every student, regardless of their starting point, has the dedicated time and support necessary to thrive. It’s not just "What I Need Time," it’s a commitment to a mastery-based educational model.

Scaling Innovation Through Agile Leadership

The traditional hierarchy—the "command and control" model where a leader dictates every 'how' is not just inefficient in today's knowledge economy; it is obsolete. In education, where the work is inherently complex, dynamic, and requires continuous adaptation, the path to sustained excellence demands a fundamental shift in how we lead. It’s time to move beyond managing schools like assembly lines and adopt the Agile Leadership mindset, which I recently discussed on my podcast Unpacking the Backpack.

Agile leadership is not a set of tools; it’s a commitment to a new organizational operating system. It recognizes that the person closest to the student—the educator—has the most accurate information and should be empowered to act on it. This transition is built on three core pillars: a radical mindset shift, the adoption of servant-based practices, and a focus on systemic organizational impact.

The Mindset Shift: From Control to Coaching

The greatest barrier to agility is a leader's resistance to relinquishing control, something that I address in great detail in Digital Leadership. Agile leadership flips the traditional organizational pyramid, transforming the leader from the chief decision-maker into the Chief Impediment Remover to become a servant leader.

Instead of focusing on Output ("Did you complete the five pages of the curriculum?") a truly agile school leader focuses on Outcomes ("Did completing that curriculum improve student mastery and critical thinking?"). The job is to constantly ask Why and ensure every team—from the grade level to the central office—is deeply connected to the ultimate goal: delivering maximum value to the student (Paige, 2011).

This transition requires leaders to embrace ambiguity and failure not as shortcomings, but as necessary data points. In a complex, disruptive world, we know the destination (student success), but the best route must be discovered. Leaders must actively model and celebrate "safe-to-fail" experimentation, treating innovative instructional trials as low-cost investments in learning (Wagstaff, 2021). The foundation for this is Psychological Safety—the belief that staff and students will not be penalized or humiliated for speaking up with ideas or mistakes (Edmondson, 2018). An agile leader's primary role is to establish this safety; without it, problems are hidden, and small mistakes become systemic crises.

Consider agile leadership as a lighthouse, providing the constant, unwavering vision and psychological safety needed for the journey. The team on the flexible raft represents self-organizing individuals who are empowered to quickly adapt and respond to the immediate, unpredictable challenges of the stormy sea (the current state of education). This illustrates that the agile leader's job is not to row, but to illuminate the path and ensure the vessel is structurally capable of navigating change.

Key Practices: Empowering the Self-Organizing Team

The mindset is the engine; the practices are the wheels that drive organizational change. The agile leader's day fundamentally changes, prioritizing coaching, alignment, and systems improvement.

1. Purpose-Driven Alignment

Agile leaders are the ultimate communicators of the Why. They use tools like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and SMART goals to cascade the organizational vision into measurable, actionable goals for every team and department. This continuous, clear communication ensures that an educator's daily lesson planning is directly linked to the school’s overarching strategic purpose. The leader facilitates regular, low-friction forums to share this vision, ensuring no team ever loses sight of the ultimate goal.

2. Nurturing Self-Organizing Teams

In an agile environment, the unit of delivery is the self-organizing, cross-functional team (grade-level or content-specific). An agile leader does not assign tasks; they define the problem space, such a gap in student learning or a need for a new resource and empower the team to figure out the solution. They decentralize decision-making, delegating full authority for process improvement and content delivery to the educators closest to the work. The leader steps in only to manage external roadblocks or conflicts that the team cannot resolve internally (Lee et al., 2016).

3. Institutionalizing Continuous Feedback

Agile is built on rapid feedback loops. Leaders institutionalize and protect crucial "inspect and adapt" mechanisms like the retrospective, committing to removing one systemic impediment the team identifies. They engage in leader standard work, which includes dedicated one-on-ones and "Gemba walks" (going to where the work is happening) to observe the system of work, the processes, not just the people, to provide timely, specific, and actionable feedback.

Systemic Impact: Optimizing the Flow of Value

The true power of agile leadership is realized when it scales innovation across the entire organization.

The ultimate enemy of agility is the organizational silo, which is often the wall between grade levels, departments, or central office functions. Agile leaders operate at the system level, shifting the focus from optimizing individual departments to optimizing the end-to-end flow of value to the student (Wong & Keng, 2024). They proactively break down these silos, championing cross-functional collaboration and redesigning the structure to mirror the value stream. This approach drives continuous improvement, transforming the organization itself into a product that is constantly refined based on feedback.

Agile leadership is not a methodology; it is a commitment to continuous learning, to empowering people, and to focusing relentlessly on student value. It requires courage, humility, and a fundamental belief that the people in our schools are best suited to decide how to achieve the educational outcomes we all seek. Leaders must make the clear choice: move from controlling to coaching, from predicting to adapting, and from measuring activity to celebrating impact.

Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Harvard Business Review.

Lee, Y., Warkentin, M., & Liu, C. (2016). Agile project management: A review and framework for future research. Journal of Management Information Systems, 33(3), 443–478.

Paige, D. D. (2011). “That sounded good!”: Using whole class choral reading to improve fluency. The Reading Teacher, 65(3), 190–200.

Wagstaff, S. (2021). The agility shift: Leveraging agile principles for organizational transformation in education. Journal of Educational Administration, 59(1), 74-90.

Wong, S. Y., & Keng, N. S. (2024). Scaling agile in complex organizations: The role of transformational leadership and cross-functional teams. European Journal of Innovation Management, 27(1), 121–143.