Block Schedulling Essays - Education, Curricula, Block Scheduling

Block Schedulling Six classes a day, five days week, every day the same schedule. Telephones and radios were still luxuries when high schools nationwide petrified the school day into this rigid pattern. The refrigerator and television hadn't been invented, much less the copy machine, computer, and video player. We live in a very different world now, and we know more about how students learn. Yet most contemporary high school and middle school students are still locked into the same schedule that their great-grandparents experienced when they were teenagers. The big question here is what is wrong with the traditional six or seven period day? For starters, say critics, the pace is tough. A typical student will be in nine locations working on nine different activities in a six-and-a-half-hour school day. An average teacher must teach five classes, dealing with 125-180 students with several preparations. This frantic, fragmented schedule is unlike any experienced either before or after high school. It produces a hectic, impersonal, inefficient instructional environment, states Joseph Carroll (1994), limits the amount of time to go in-depth on a subject, and tends to discourage using a variety of learning activities. Opportunities for individualization of instruction and meaningful interaction between students and teachers are hard to come by. No matter how complex or simple the school subject, the schedule assigns an impartial national average of fifty-one minutes per class period, say Robert Canady and Michael Rettig (1995). And despite wide variation in the time it takes individual students to succeed at learning any given task, the allocated time is identical for all. The 1994 report of the National Education Commission on Time and Learning states, Schools will have a design flaw as long as their organization is based on the assumption that all students can learn on the same schedule. In addition, since most disciplinary problems occur during scheduled transitions, the more transitions, the more problems. In our district, the principal states this as the number one discipline problem in school during passing times. And a great deal of time is lost in simply starting and ending so many classes in a day. Traditional, inflexible scheduling is based on administrative and institutional needs, say Gary Watts and Shari Castle (1993). Flexible scheduling patterns are a much better match in order to meet the educational needs of students and the professional needs of teachers. The next question that begs to be answered is, What exactly is block scheduling? Gordon Cawelti (1994) defines it as follows: At least part of the daily schedule is organized into larger blocks of time (more than sixty minutes) to allow flexibility for a diversity of instructional activities. The variations are endless, and may involve reconfiguring the lengths of periods and semesters as well as the daily schedule. Some of the possibilities detailed by Canady and Rettig include: *Four ninety-minute blocks per day; school year divided into two semesters; former year-long courses completed in one semester. *Alternate day block schedule: six or eight courses spread out over two days; teachers meet with half of their students each day. *Two large blocks and three standard-sized blocks per day; year divided into sixty-day trimesters with a different subject taught in the large blocks each trimester. *Some classes (such as band, typing, foreign language) taught daily, others in longer blocks on alternate days. *Six courses, each meeting in three single periods, and one double period per week. *Seven courses. Teachers meet with students three days out of four--twice in single periods, once in a double period. And there are many more. Any of these can be modified, of course, to meet the specific needs of a school. Scheduling changes are usually linked to increasing retention, reducing lecturing by instructors and gaining the opportunity for more creative teaching strategies. They are often part of a major restructuring effort. As with anything, there are advantages as well as disadvantages. What are the advantages of block scheduling? First, larger blocks of time allow for a more flexible and productive classroom environment, along with more opportunities for using varied and interactive teaching methods. Other benefits listed by Jeffrey Sturgis (1995) include: more effective use of school time, decreased class size, increased number of course offerings,