What scheduling is better, a block schedule or regular 8 period a day schedule? Ane why? It’s for school. Thx
Is this for homework? That’s not looked very kindly upon here, fyi.
My school voted against block scheduling, for what it’s worth.
We have a 6 (or 7 if you take “zero period”) day, and I wish we had a block schedule, because I think I’d probably like it better. However, this is just my opinion. (Which suggests this might belong in IMHO…)
Does research show that one is better? I don’t know. Try googling research “block schedule” or something to that effect.
I had an 8 period day until high school when we switched to block. IMHO, block is much better. You have more time to focus on what’s going on in class, and can get much more done in a day. It messes around with some of the electives though. Band people can only get to band one semester a year, and it’s hard to schedule full band practices around individual after-school activities. It’s also a bit difficult when you have a certain subject the first semester of a year and you don’t get the continuation of it 'til second semester of the next (for example, algebra I and II). It’s surprising how much you can forget in almost a year. But other than that, block is great.
~literatelady
In my high school (though theyve since changed it) we had a 6 block on 6 day cycle. Meaning we had 8 courses a year, all year long, six per day, on a rotating cycle of 6 day “weeks”. I liked it. I liked having the same course all year, rather than having two halves possibly distanced by quite a bit of time. This system basically made sure that every student had at least one 4-block elective (4 classes on 6 days) every year, some also had an additional 2-block one. The only hard part was coming back on Mondays (especially after holidays) and asking yourself “is today Day 3 or 4? Should I have brought my gym clothes?”
I loved my HS schedule. We had A Day and B Day. 4 classes each day.
Thus, we had longer classes, and longer to do homework.
With a regular schedule (8 classes in one day), you’d have to go home and do 8 classes worth of homework. If you had a p/t job, you were pretty well screwed on the nights you work. Since I worked alternating nights in HS, I always had a night to do homework.
Example:
Monday: A Day, get out of school, go to work. Work until 12a-1a (which I regularly did), go home and sleep. Screw homework.
Tuesday: B Day, go home after school, do homework for A and B Day.
I liked it that way.
A choice between a block schedule and a regular schedule depends on the needs of the school and the students. Some classes, for example, can use the block hours: science labs, honors classes, language classes, a lot of your core curriculum, etc…
When a school becomes overpopulated, the ability to offer the needed classes to all of the students becomes strained; in that particular case, a solution of a blended-block schedule on a rotational period might prove to be the best answer. Currently I support, as one of my admin duties for a public school district, a student information system. The city in which I work is in the middle of a population explosion; as a result, the high school will have a new buddy built in the near future, but until then it must deal with all of the new students. We’ve implemented a 5-day rotational period, blended-block schedule to handle the students and their classes.
We’ve been told that our schedule is perhaps the most complex in the United States. I’m not sure if that’s true, or if we were told that to brighten our day. 
Blended-block schedules, as you may have surmised, are a combination of block and regular scheduling; our teachers, at the end of the previous year, are given the choice of blocking or having a regular length for their class(es). Not everyone can be accomodated (after all, you only have a limited number of hours), but most are.
Our days are labeled as thus: A, B, C, D, E. “E” days are when the students go to each of their 8 periods, no blocking. Classes meet on a schedule of ABCDE (every day with only one period for each meeting for each class, regardless of their blocking on other days); ACE (with a two period block on A & C days, and a one period block on E days); and BDE (with a two period block on B & D days, and a one period block on E days). Classes on a BDE rotation do not meet on A & C days; classes on an ACE rotation do not meet on B & D days. As mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, all classes meet on E days.
The high school at which I attended implemented a fairly vanilla schedule which most of you will recognize: 7 periods per day, one period per class. I’m not sure if they’ve changed that since then, but it sure makes it easier to understand.
Master schedules for schools (and by “master schedule” I mean the overall schedule the counselors or registrar must design–at the beginning of the new year or the end of the previous year–to offer the needed classes with the given number of students and available teachers) are extremely difficult for any school. Unless that school only has ten students; then yeah. Cake. 
I have tutored many kids subjected to the block teaching idea. The class material progresses along so quickly, they cannot absorb the rudimentary concepts needed to advance. Then, the homework cannot be comensurate to the amount of material covered per day to reinforce the lesson.
Those in education getting Ph.D’s are dangerous people. They have a good idea, in theory, which gets implemented in practice upon the unsuspecting student guinea pigs. If you know what “open space” is, it was NOT INTENDED for teacher-directed learning, but lab space with stations for child-directed learning. However, it saves on building materials! So…
As for block schedules, it is the same damn thing. It was meant for classes like art and music, but not the core courses. Not only are the kids suffering, the general public will be paying the price when these kids get into the working world. They go through these 3-hr courses like robots. After the first hour, the brain is fried and shuts down. The teacher just babbles cluelessly onwards.
Don’t forget: These classes meet EVERY SINGLE DAY! Even in college, where courses meet every other day usually with a recitation in between to review, I never heard of a 3-hr lecture! We had a 3-hr lab which was not as taxing, and a 3-hr evening course which met once a week.
I think our educators to should be subjected to their own devices of terror so they can understand what the hell they’re doing to our kids, once eager and bright-eyes, are now zombies. Nothing a good fix won’t cure…so what has education done? Have our educators, administrators, and politicians succeeded? Tragically, they are failing ALL of us. The impact on society is scary. - Jinx
Yes, but three hour classes isn’t the norm for block schedules is it? When I was in high school, we had four classes a semester, and each class was 90 minutes long. The other school in the area had a schedule similar to the one that Silver Serpentine described with students alternating classes every day. I’ve never heard of a school that kept students in class for more than 1.5 hours.
My school switched to block schedule when I was in 10th grade. I liked it because you only had a few classes to focus on per semester, and my overall gpa went from an 85 to a 97 because of this. The only problem was that my math and Spanish skills usually got rusty because those classes were only offered in the spring. So I would have math and spanish in the spring of one year, then never get a chance to put the material to use again until spring of the next year.
I must disagree with you Jinx - when I was still in high school a couple of years ago, I found block scheduling to be superior. (My highschool switched between my sophmore & junior years, so I got the joys and pains of both.) I didn’t see the people zoning out, any more than with “normal” scheduling, and I learned a lot more in the same timeframe, using the block scheduling. I also found block scheduling more productive, for the reasons below.
Generally, I found that with any class, no matter what the length, the first 5-10 minutes where completely wasted, with the teacher taking roll, passing out stuff from yesterday, ect. And you couldn’t get anything done with the last 5-10 minutes either. Now, with the 50 minute classes we had with normal scheduling, that only gives you 30-40 minutes of actual instruction time. When my school switched to block scheduling, with 110 minute classes, you could still get 90-100 good minutes of instruction in.
Just my 2 cents.
While I’m sure that you have anecdotal evidence of some students reacting poorly to block scheduling, Jinx, I disagree with your overall assessment. Block scheduling has proven to be both very popular and successful in the district in which I work and the surrounding districts. In addition, I’m not familiar with any local districts providing three hour blocks (although if you actually mean 180 minutes or just 3 periods, I’m not sure); the most would be two. (Which isn’t to say that there aren’t 3 period blocks out there. There may very well be; I’m just not familiar with any.)
In my district, the vast majority of students have thrived in block classes; and the classes are largely core curriculum. Our students’ test scores remain higher than both state and federal averages and a high percentage of our students move on to higher learning, so if there is a flaw within block scheduling, we’re not seeing it in the district.
There are a lot of plusses and minuses in a block system. The school I teach at has 7 periods per semester, with 1st period happening every day for 50 mins, and then rotating 2/4/6 (“A” days) and 3/5/7 (“B” days) each of which is about an hour and a half.
Being in a music department, I find that for most music classes it’s a problem. Instrumentalists (especially at the high school age) generally just can’t play for that long, singers can’t sing that long, etc etc. So, you end up with less productive class time than if you had two separate 45 minute classes.
There are always teachers students learn well from, and teachers who are, um, less inspiring. Certainly, twice as long stuck in a class which is failing you anyway is going to be miserable, and I know that even in ‘good’ classes it can be a challenge to hold everyone’s attention for an hour and a half.
But, the benefits in most cases outweigh the negatives, IMO. There is more time for in class projects, labs, discussion, reading, etc etc etc. Forty-five minutes is so short a period of time that I think it’s really challenging to make anything effective except a lecture and/or doing simple problems/worksheets. The posibilities open up dramatically when you lengthen the class time.
I do find the concept of eight classes split over two semesters in a 4x4 type schedule to be problematic. As has been mentioned here already, any sort of sequenced program of study will suffer, and any kind of ongoing programs (like band or chorus) are going to have big problems.
I loved the block. The way we did it was 2 1/2 hours a day for 36 days, two classes, then switch. We had 5 of these blocks in a year. It kind of sucked for gym class, I guess, being not very athletic. But I really liked it. It is challenging to say the least - it isn’t for an ADHD kid or anything. If you can concentrate for that long, great. I hardly had any homework. The thing with the block is you have to work constantly with it, or else you’ll get behind. If you have a good work ethic, you’ll be successful.
However, the aforementioned school was more of a ‘get kids in and out and make sure they graduate, who cares about teaching them well because we’re a community school in a crappy neighborhood’ sort of thing, so I went to a more academically inclined high school that is on the semester. I don’t really like the semester. First of all, it is just so long. I get bored being in the same class for so long. My grades usually slip after midterm - I need that constant pressure of marks to do better, I guess. And getting to lockers between classes is hell - we have two buildings, across a parking lot and street from each other. We have four minutes to get from class to class. Many of the classrooms are centralized by grade and/or subject area, but tough luck if you got a locker in a different area.
This belongs in IMHO, doesn’t it?
Anyway, block scheduling can be gruelling for the really boring classes. The best answer depends on what the student, teacher, and course prefer. Some courses do better meeting as shorter periods, some longer. I think the best is a hybrid system, but not as complicated as SkipMagic’s. The high school I went to currently has this type of system. In the morning, there is a block schedule but in the afternoon you go to the same class every day.
angel6g,
Something to consider as well in your apparent research of block scheduling and 8 period day…All the previous responses touched upon the major curriculum, scheduling, personal preference, and administrative reasons, but keep in mind that some schools choose to do block scheduling for financial reasons (cutting costs). How this specifically cuts costs I cannot say, but I am aware that in some rural areas in Minnesota have gone to block schedules and there may be some research out there with financial comparisons.
The difference between scheduling usually varies because of district needs (whether that be school board directive, financial reasons, curriculum design, or simple preference).