Block Scheduling

Introduction

With a block schedule, students in a middle or high school attend four classes daily. Usually, the classes last for an hour and a half. Block scheduling is similar to scheduling in college, as the classes are longer. As with period scheduling, the students get a break for lunch in the middle of the day. Since the classes meet for twice as long as usual, each class may only last a single semester. A student may take biology one semester, then algebra the second, for example. In some cases, a student may take courses for the entire year but will only attend each class every other day. For example, she may have biology on Monday and algebra on Tuesday (Zepeda, Pp. 137).

Block scheduling has gained widespread popularity - without a research base attesting to its effectiveness. Research professionals have not yet determined whether implementing block scheduling results in either improved instructional practices or increased student achievement.

Discussion

High schools across the United States have been recently shifting form traditional scheduling to block scheduling. It was estimated that around 50 percent of secondary schools in the United States are now in some form of block scheduling. In Virginia for example, 168 of its 294 high schools use block scheduling according to the report by Short and Thayer (1999). The shift was basically driven by the desires of the schools' administrators, teachers and students to find a schedule which would result to high academic performance in all subject matters (Dexter et al., 2006).

Block scheduling replaces the traditional 40-50 minute class periods found in most schools. Instead of 6-7 periods in the day there are only 4-5. Class periods last typically twice as long as they would in the traditional schedule. This allows teachers to accomplish more in a single class period. It also sets itself up to allow team teaching across different curricula. Another key difference is that students on a traditional schedule take a single class over the entire course of the year, where as a student on a block schedule will complete a single class over the course of a semester.

Traditional scheduling which has been implemented in many high schools before block scheduling was considered was almost purely lecture. Traditional schedule is commonly divided into six to eight period of instructions in a day with each period allotted with 40 to 55 minutes per day. Around 3 to 5 minutes of the instructional time however would be immediately lost in changing classes. Thus instead of considering the needs of the students, the teacher would only be focused on finishing the class discussion within the remaining instructional time (Queen, 2003). Although it appears that block scheduling increases instructional time, it actually reduces it. This happens because a two 50- minute class in traditional scheduling would be fused to make one 90-minute class.

Objectives

The objectives of the planning unit include: -

The reduction of classes that allow students to concentrate on training.

Flexibility of time that students learn at their own pace.

Provide more opportunities for students to ...