Schools abandon the Block system

While there are still schools happy with the block system, I suspect the pendulum is swinging back towards the 7 period day. The reason can be found in the link I just provided, namely, "Those teachers who haven't changed teaching styles and still rely heavily on lecturing were least happy with the block, as were students in their classes." The 90 minute block system works best when you take a topic and cover it from three directions, using a combination of lecture, activity, and multi-media. That might be 30 minutes of lecture, 30 minutes of video, and group colaboration, or it might mean Adler style socratic method involving 10-15 minutes of lecture followed by 30 minutes of discussion and debate, either covering two topics, or followed by video, computer research, or some other activity.

Instead, Springfield students and administrators are telling me that too many teachers are still teaching as if they had a 50 minute period. Some just stretch the teaching they would do for 50 minutes longer, others just leave the rest of the time for homework. Students with experience in both systems prefer the block system because their is less homework, because teachers routinely don't fill the classroom time with teaching. Administrators argue that they did not go to a block system to create mini-study halls. They point to a lack of change in the test scores of the district indicating no change taking place between block and period. And block systems require a handful more teachers. In periods of financial stress, keeping the block system with no percieved benefit seems like bad judgement.

Opponants of the block point to these issiues:
Longer classes are incompatible with the attention spans of most students (20-50 minute attention spans are commonly cited)
Instead of trying to cover twice as much material in a longer class period, the natural tendency is to water down the material to maintain interest, resorting to movies, games, doing homework in class.
Students may experience a gap of 8 to 13 months before taking the next course in that series
Transfering from a district using block to one using periods or vise versa can be tough.

There are more comlaints at the site linked to but I don't take most of them seriously or regard them as technical issues. Lets look at the four charges above.

Attention span of 20-50 minutes: while this may seem to favor the 50 minute period, it should be remembered that the block is supposed to be 3 units of 30 minutes of different teaching style activites on one to three topics. For example. One day in my own Vietnam unit I lectured for about 20 minutes on problems of mobilization, identifying the draft, the use of reserves, and the expansion of the army. Then I presented a list of all the strategies urged by the services, political leaders, and other influential groups in the conduct of the war. Students were grouped and ask to play the role of presidential advisors choosing a policy for winning the war and being able to defend it. (I always like teaching strategic thinking because it benefits so many areas - financial planning, career planning, business planning, &c.) The last 20 minutes we watched a video segment of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident taped from the History Channel's episode of presidential scandals. In practice, this lesson had 20 minutes of lecture, 40 minutes of group work and presentation, and 20 minutes of video, as well as about 5 minutes of administration before class and 5 minutes of down time afterward during which I took questions on the unit test. The needs of attention for novelty were satisfied by the variation of teaching styles, despite the fact that our topic remained the early phase of the Vietnam War.

This brings up the second charge. Watering down material by adding games and movies. Is that what I described? No, but I am an advocate of block, and hopefully do a good job with the block. So some of this criticism may just be a mischaracterization of what I did as games and movies, when I think its pretty clear that genuine learning took place. I also have the summary reports students handed in advocating their strategy and know that there was higher level thinking applied to strategic consideration of a real historical problem. As a side note, the students favored various combinations of the marine corps approach to winning the war often combined with the Army's special operations counter insurgency doctrine.

However, I give real credibility to the complaint that much material is watered down with games, videos, and by allowing homework to be done in class. I see it and hear about it all the time. While good teachers know how to use the block system and how to keep learning progressing during 80-90 minutes, to many just teach the way they did in the 50 minute period and fill out the other 40 minutes with fluff. In the humanities classes this often means superfluous videos, or videos that could be valuable not used to challenge students to think. Math class is the worst offender in putting homework into the classroom, though all are guilty of it. One of the comlaints not mentioned so far is that some students and some subjects require routine learning. Languages and math (itself a language) are the obvious candidates. Homework should be the opportunity for students to look at their material between classes to get that practice. Part of the purpose of homework is to get students to crack the book at home. The more self-teaching students are the more self-teaching they will do. Abandoning homework for classroom filler turns students into empty vessals which need a teacher to do the filling. There is also the idea that school should be entertaining. If learning can be so, great. But when it cannot, we should not provide empty entertainments because the kids expect it, because we want them to like us, or because we don't know what else to do. Games and videos (as well as the combination of them - the video game) must always be educational first, or they don't belong in the school. Ultimatly this criticism is what is undoing the block schedule in many districts.

Another criticism is that students may have long breaks in which they don't see a subject. One of the ideas behind the block is that it would facilitate inter-disciplinary lerning by encouraging coordination between teachers. I know that a lot of science gets worked into my world history plans and a lot of math into my US history plans. In a block, its easier to spend the time doing a 30 minute section on voting analysis (a new use for percentages!), the business cycle, or demographics. If that math comes after a video of the same topic and is followed by a discussion of the evidence from text, video, and the numbers, its much easier to do it than if you have a 50 minute block. Unfortunatly, the block has done little to foster interdisciplinarity or other kinds of extra-curricular goodies (I like to use art history, for instance).

Transfering is a problem, but its more a problem of variation between districts than it is of the block system. I would actually increase variation in a market based approach to schools which would tend to increase consumer (that is parent) control of the school, which would tend to increase this problem. The solution is for a teacher to spend a little time and devise a program of integration for the new student, so the student can quickly get to a place where the classroom is afterward profitable.