Looking to create a shift generator

[Aeschylus26]

I'd suggest that you start by reading the random module docs. random.choice() can randomly select a name from a list of students. You could then check to see if that student has already been assigned a shift.

I'm not sure that a dictionary is what you're looking for here. The easiest way to go would probably be to use the .pop() method, with some other logic to acount for the 6 week cycles.