Editor note: This is the first half of a story written by summer intern Jason Tidd about how Iola High School has changed its class schedule format.
When Iola High School students and teachers return to school this week, they will find a new type of daily schedule. The so-called “block” scheduling, which has been used for over a decade, will be replaced with an hourly schedule.
In block scheduling, four classes meet every other day for 87-minute periods. Classes alternate between meeting Monday, Wednesday and Friday one week and switching to Tuesday and Thursday the following week.
This means teachers only see their students every other day during the school week with block scheduling, and that was a problem, said Dana Daugharthy, a high school chemistry and physics teacher.
With the new hour schedule, the same seven 50-minute periods will meet every day of the school week, which Daugharthy said will be better for students.
“The repetition of every single day, getting exposed to the same content, I think will be good for the kids,” Daugharthy said.
Another flaw with block scheduling, said Matt Kleopfer, the band director for the high school and middle school, is the extended length of time spent in a block class is too much for most students.
“A lot of them are just not able to concentrate at an extremely high level for an hour and a half,” Kleopfer said. “You might get them that way for about 40-50 minutes, but after that they’re just fried.”
RETENTION becomes an issue when teachers don’t see their students every day, Kleopfer said.
“You waste a lot of time in block scheduling reviewing what you went over the class before because if you don’t have day-to-day, you don’t have that retention level as high as it should be,” Kleopfer said. “The kids forget.”
Kleopfer said his middle school and high school band students worked on learning the 12 major scales this past school year. The middle schoolers, including beginning-level 6th-graders, learned the scales better than the high schoolers.
The reason, Kleopfer said, was because the middle schoolers had better retention due to the repetition of practicing the scales every single day, whereas the high schoolers were stuck with rehearsing every other day in the block schedule.
Now, the change will allow him to create a consistent weekly schedule for the first time since teaching at Iola.
“The amount of time we have to spend on warming up (and) the pacing of the rehearsal is going to change pretty drastically,” Kleopfer said. “It mainly has to do with just the simple thought and comfort of knowing that you’re going to get to see (the students) the next day. So you’re still able to attack the big thing that you were before, but you’re just taking a lot smaller chunks, and in the end you go further.”
MATH CLASSES are served better by an hourly schedule than a block one, said Dianne Kauth, a high school math teacher, because students learn math best by taking small pieces at a time.
“It’s hard (to teach with a block schedule) because there’s too much in two sections, (but) not enough in one,” Kauth said. “And if you cover two sections of work … it’s like water on a duck, the material runs off. I mean, you can’t absorb it.”
