Education
March 13, 2026
School calendar: where time is gained and where it is lost
Listing structuring themes and anticipating small interventions throughout the months allows for flexible and consistent work
In the weeks leading up to the start of classes, the calendar usually reaches the teaching teams through information-dense institutional meetings. In many districts, especially in the state of São Paulo, these moments are led by professionals with different nomenclatures — CGP, CGPG, PC, PCA, COE — responsible for the pedagogical and organizational articulation of the school. In other regions of the country, the designations vary, but the scope of the function remains similar: interpreting guidelines, organizing collective planning, and mediating pedagogical work.
The environment usually reveals a careful attempt at hospitality. On a side table, freshly brewed coffee and small snacks announce scheduled breaks that promise to ease the morning or afternoon pace. Between presentations, professors take notes, record images of projections for later consultation, and talk in low voices as the meeting time progresses.
They are more or less predictable meetings where known content returns, many with new nomenclatures and renewed expectations. There is a collective effort to make the meeting lighter, even though the volume of guidelines anticipates future demands and responsibilities that do not always find, in the school structure, the necessary conditions for their full realization. In this scenario, the calendar appears as a formal guideline — still far from its potential as a living pedagogical instrument.
First of all, it is worth remembering that the calendar does not belong only to the school. It accompanies anyone who needs to organize goals over time. Those who intend to take a course, take care of their health, maintain a job, reserve time for family, or complete a project know that it is not enough to wish: it is necessary to look at the calendar of the month, mark commitments, divide priorities, and calculate possible intervals. This seemingly simple movement requires time and attention. Failing to plan the calendar means living at the mercy of improvisation.
In school, something similar happens. It is not enough to know that the student will remain for a few hours in the school environment — whether in partial, extended, or full-time education models. The question is not just how many hours are spent at the institution, but what is done with each minute of this time shared among students, teachers, and educational staff.
In her book “Policies of Full-Time Education in Brazil and Expansion of the School Day in the International Context”, published in 2024 by Editora Acadêmica, Professor Cláudia da Mota Darós Parente, from the Graduate Program in Education at Unesp, cites the importance of differentiating the expansion of time spent at school from what is understood as full education.
In the work, the author presents remarkable experiences that sought to reorganize the school and its times — and also its spaces. From the Children’s Parks project conceived by Mário de Andrade to the Escolas Parque in Salvador and Brasília by Anísio Teixeira, through the Experimental Classes, the Vocational Gymnasiums, the CIEPs, the Single Day for the Basic Cycle, and the Integral Attention Centers for Children (CAIC), a fertile seedbed of political and pedagogical initiatives aimed at expanding the school’s formative possibilities is revealed throughout the 20th century. Each temporal choice reveals, in this context, a conception of education and defines whether the lived time will be merely filled or truly formative.
Perhaps the calendar only truly comes into existence when it leaves the wall or the app and moves to the desk. The calendar, open before you, clearly exposing the commitments of the week, month, quarter, semester, and year, takes on another dimension when analyzed critically and in depth. A date marking an event immediately points to the preceding period, when the appropriate provisions will have to be taken, one by one, according to the methodology used by the professor, which will define the process and formative actions of the course. Four movements can help in the process of time organization:
1. Establish annual structuring axes
Instead of reacting to each campaign in isolation, the school can define two to four major axes aligned with its pedagogical project. Example: citizenship, cultural diversity, health, sustainability.
Campaigns and demands are now analyzed based on a simple question: do they dialogue with our priority axes? If yes, they are integrated into the path. If not, they assume a complementary character. The calendar ceases to react to demands and begins to guide the path.
2. Plan culminations in advance
Events do not need to interrupt the flow of pedagogical work. They should be a result of it. If there will be an action on indigenous culture in August, small interventions can occur since the first semester. The same can happen with black consciousness, inclusion, or traffic education. When the culmination arrives, it is a consequence of a process — not a rushed mobilization. Dates cease to be isolated peaks and become syntheses.
3. Create collective priority criteria
Not all external demands need to be central. By establishing clear criteria — alignment with the pedagogical project, formative impact, operational feasibility — management organizes decisions and reduces circumstantial pressures. Collective decision-making does not eliminate tensions, but avoids dispersion.
4. Integrate themes in cross-cutting projects
Fragmentation consumes time. Integration saves energy. An annual citizenship project can incorporate discussions on traffic, emotional health, and cultural diversity without multiplying disconnected events. The calendar then functions as a line of development, not a sequence of interruptions.
This meticulous examination distinguishes priorities, flexibilities, and inevitabilities. Although it may seem like extra work, it is precisely this that avoids a large part of future work. After all, the contemporary school calendar is not composed solely of teaching days dedicated to the distribution of curricular content, breaks, and holidays.
It carries a succession of relevant campaigns and social themes that span the entire year: White January, Blue April, Yellow May, Yellow September, Pink October, Blue November, among many other initiatives that broaden the discussion on health, inclusion, and citizenship.
Alongside these campaigns, civic dates and legal requirements persist, which call for the constant presence of cultural and historical themes in the curriculum, such as law 13.006/2014, which deals with the mandatory screening of national films in basic education, and law 14.988/2024, which establishes the realization of the Inter-school Cultural Week.
Listing structuring themes and anticipating small interventions throughout the months allows for flexible and consistent work, supported by a truly detailed calendar — not restricted to final dates, but attentive to processes that need to be gradually cultivated.
School management is responsible for guiding these initial organizational efforts, and the teacher for making them effective in the classroom. It is worth reinforcing: an initial effort that reduces frustrations and avoids extra work in the future.
Before demanding innovation, it may be necessary to go back to the simple calendar and ask: where is the time that is here? Where do our ideas really fit? Between meetings, campaigns, laws, and goals, the calendar continues to be the place where education gains substance or becomes mere formality. Reading the time carefully can be the first step for the school year to cease being a sequence of urgencies and truly become a formative journey.
At the end of the initial pedagogical orientation meeting, when the coffee cools and the notebooks close, the same silent question that opened the encounter remains: how to transform lived time into experience that makes sense? One possible answer is to remember that no training is complete if it leaves aside what truly matters — the integral human being who needs to emerge from it.
Who wrote this column
Roberto Munhoz
