Pro's And Consequences of Block Scheduling

This summer in Park City, one of the hot topics was block scheduling. Currently, I am going through my first year of this new format. In a series of articles during the academic year, I hope to give you a feeling for the pros and cons, how the students reacted, and--most importantly in the context of PCMI--how instruction is affected. My goal is to answer questions. In doing so, I am sure to create even more. This summer I will provide a forum one evening to answer these questions. If interest is large enough, Nadine may want to organize a panel discussion.

This article is intended to give you a feel for the nuts and bolts of how our block works so you can better understand what I have had to adjust to. The generalizations you make from this information should help you imitate our successes and avoid our mistakes as you make the same transition.

Formerly Eisenhower followed a standard schedule:

• six classes per day
• every class 55 minutes long with 7 minutes between
• fourth period 2 hours with four 23 minute lunches

• four classes
• each class is 90 minutes long with 8 minutes between
• 2nd period is 100 minutes for announcements and other housekeeping items
• all 3000 students go to a 42 minute lunch after 3rd period (starts at 12:18)
• students may buy and bring food to class between 1st and 2nd period

For teachers in our building, there were two main issues. The first dealt with how the single lunch with 3000 kids would be possible. The second dealt with the administration's desire to inservice us twice per week for 45 minutes during our conference (off) period.

Our cafeteria was not equipped to handle 3000 students at one time, so carts were bought and distributed throughout the Commons and gym areas to ease the pressure on the main cafeteria. Students are allowed to hang out anywhere on the first floor. Rooms were created where students can watch a movie, play games or listen to music. For the first week of school, kids were a bit confused and felt they had to get their food right away. This created very long lines. Now, nine weeks later, many students will wait around for a while, and lines have become reasonable.

The teacher component to lunch is duty. Every teacher is expected to stand duty in an assigned area every other week for half of the lunch period. This makes for a very short teacher lunch, but it is tolerable. I use the lunch to allow students to come to my room and use the graphing calculators, get some extra help or make up a quiz. Some of the students just come up for a quiet place to study. It might be good to add a study room to the list of rooms for student activities in the above paragraph. Our kids can use the library, but no food or drink is allowed, thereby harming the incentive.

To prepare for the lunch, our administration showed very good foresight in "practicing" with 1500 kids the last 3 weeks of the previous year. We combined the first two and last two lunches during 4th period and let students have the entire hour to see how they would react. It was a great predictor for the current year. I would strongly recommend such a trial run at your school.

While lunches and lunch duty have been a success, the required 45 minutes of inservice twice per week has been a great interruption in my week. This is not to say that our inservices have not been relevant. However one of the greatest adjustments to block scheduling has been planning time. Where I used to be able to plan a lesson in 15 to 20 minutes, now it can take up to an hour. I find myself in desperate need of my conference time to get this planning done.

Our head principal could not have been more correct when he said, "You cannot stand and lecture for 90 minutes!" Planning lessons with alternative strategies, looking up reference materials, designing new structures to highly successful old lessons takes much more time than administration allowed for. I feel the reason for this is that most administrators come from the "lecture era" of teaching, and remember preparation as being very short and sweet. It will be very important to make them understand that this is not the case, and that every minute you are spared for preparation will allow you to teach much more effectively.

Inservices should be held when there is a need for administration to interact with the faculty. In our building, the most effective inservices have been the problem solving sessions involving faculty or administration throwing out problems, then finding solutions. Other inservices on special education and English as a Second (or Other) Language, have been informative, but the same things we hear every year. This type of information should be printed, put in our boxes and read by teachers. Those with questions could get answers from the appropriate source during their conference or lunch.

These are just a scratch in the surface of the many issues regarding the transition to block scheduling. Personally, I see this as a very positive change in instruction with many opportunities for us to implement the things we learned in Park City and will learn at Princeton. Next news letter, look for an article on my successes and failures in trying to use 90 minutes effectively.

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