block scheduling comment

from Anonymous:

The school my 3rd child attended as a freshman and sophomore had block scheduling and he hated it. He said that half of the period was almost always wasted, except for the (occasional) science lab. My brother taught in a high school (which his children attended) which switched to block scheduling and he says the same thing. The only way enough material can be covered is to rely on the lecture format, and most of the students cannot/will not keep up with the pace or absorb the content. There is also a significant issue with retention/continuity, especially in math and foreign languages. When we moved out of that area, one of the major factors in choosing where to live was the need to avoid districts with block scheduling.

I hear the same thing from everyone.

And from Chem Prof:

I'd second the rejection of block scheduling. I advise incoming college freshmen, and those words fill me with dread. Students who theoretically have taken calculus wind up placing into precalc consistently, because they remember almost none of it. The same thing is usually true for science coursework. Worse, if they have math in a fall block one year and a spring block the next, it can be 18 months with no math class, so they just wind up reteaching everything they learned already.

Basically, block scheduling is a way to have lots of wasted time for projects, but they really only cover one semester of material in one semester. There may be exceptions, but I haven't seen them.

"You can't cram math."

Or anything else.

playing with blocks

Apparently my middle school has an "identified need" for block scheduling.

At least, I think I saw something about an identified need on a slide in the Middle School Model Schedule PowerPoint that is the sole piece of material my district is willing to reveal to parents and taxpayers.

Then today my sister explained their high school's block scheduling.

So naturally I've been on a Google mission from God looking for the good stuff.

Didn't take long:

Effective Instructional Strategies for Block Scheduling

In 2000 Jenny Burrell, Stephanie McManus, and I identified and reviewed several instructional strategies that are suitable for blocked classes.48 However, we admit that, just as a 90-minute lecture is inappropriate, a 90-minute discussion session is probably too long too. We found that teachers should change activities every 10 or 15 minutes. blah blah blah

Cooperative learning. blah blah blah

Case method. blah blah blah

Socratic seminar. blah blah blah

Synectics. In the early 1960s, William Gordon developed an approach that, through the use of analogy, enabled students to associate a new topic with prior experience.50 The teacher asks students to describe the similarities between a given topic (the concept) and some unrelated item (the analogue). For example, a biology teacher might ask her students to describe the similarities between the parts of an animal cell and the parts of a city. After reviewing these similarities, students are asked to "become" the concepts and analogues by using first-person statements of feeling. The teacher may elicit such statements as "I feel strong when my cell membrane keeps out impurities." If obvious differences exist between the topic and the comparative element, the teacher can address these differences while being careful not to destroy the links previously made. Finally, students create their own new analogies to enable them to better retain the original concepts. This method serves well as a review activity and can be a valuable tool in assisting students to retain facts and concepts.

Concept attainment. blah blah blah

Inquiry method. blah blah blah

Simulations. blah blah blah

source:
Block Scheduling Revisited

Syncretics.

That's a new one.

an amazing math teacher

My niece had a terrific algebra teacher freshman year. Scratch that: my niece had a terrific algebra teacher fall semester. Her school is on block scheduling so by January she was done with math for the next 9 months. Won’t take math again until the fall.

Here’s how he ran his class.

Every week his students have 3 chances to take a test on that week’s material. The test is short, perhaps 5 key problems. If they ace it the first time, they’re done. If they don’t ace it, they take it again; if they don’t ace it the second time, they take it one last time. The final grade stands.

The cool thing: the tests are cumulative.

The first week students take a test on the the first 5 problems; the second week students take a test on those five problems along with the next five problems; the third week they take a test on the first week’s 5 problems, the second week’s 5 problems, and the 3rd week’s 5 problems, and so on.

By the end of the semester they’ve worked up to a final exam covering everything they’ve learned in the course, which they remember because they’ve been re-tested on it every week of the semester.

The teacher also sends each parent a weekly email laying out in detail his child’s progress in the course. Parents can see whether or not their child mastered that week’s material, and they can see when he mastered it: 1st test, 2nd test, or 3rd. Parents can also see any set of 3 tests where his child did not master the material even with three tries. My sister says you could glance at the email and see exactly which material your kid barely squeaked by on.

The teacher explained his system on Back to School night and told parents not to panic when they got the initial emails because early on in the year the point total could suddenly drop 50 points when a student blew the first or second test. He told parents not to panic & not to yell at their kids because they’d have two more chances.

The emails don’t function as a veiled request for parents to kick in with reteaching and tutoring. They are information. Parents know what their kids are doing in the course. I assume that his emails do function as an invitation for parents to kick in with oversight and homework monitoring. Which is fine by me. Parents of students in his class know exactly what they need to know to manage the situation at home.

This may be especially important in my sister’s school because some kids intentionally blow off the class due to a complicated CA system whereby they get credit for “Math 1” even if they flunk Algebra 1. My sister and I agree that the problem these kids pose is school level, not teacher level. In my view (not necessarily my sister’s) the school needs to kick in with supervised homework sessions and the like. (See: LaSalle High School.) Working in a system that rewards kids for flunking algebra, this teacher deals with it by making sure parents know their kids have decided to flunk algebra, providing them with a weekly update on just how much algebra their kids have flunked to date.

The teacher is available every lunch hour and frequently after school for Extra Help. And: Extra Help actually helps. My niece went in twice when she wasn’t getting something. The reason she knew she wasn’t getting it was that she had barely squeaked by on the first two tests and still came up with a low score on the 3rd test.

She went for Extra Help after the 2nd test. My sister says the 3-test format taps into the Magic Number 3 that is embedded in the hearts and minds of children everywhere, as in: “I’m going to count to 3 and when I get to 3 you better be factoring trinomials or else.”

Clearly, the three tests serve as formative assessment. The teacher knows, the student know, and the parent knows whether the kid has or has not mastered the material covered in the course to date. That doesn’t happen in a normal math class. In a normal math class, as my sister points out, “Since no one grades homework, you don’t find out if they know anything until they flunk the test.”

This math class is far from normal because, as it turns out—and this came as a surprise—this teacher also grades homework. The way my sister and my niece found that out was that one day my niece blew off her homework: she just wrote down whatever came to mind and turned it in.
The homework came back with an “F” on top. The teacher had read her homework, corrected her homework, and graded her homework.

She went to see him and apologized. It had been years since a teacher had so much as looked at her homework and she’d assumed he wasn’t going to look at it, either. She asked if she could do it over again & the teacher said yes.

It will probably come as no surprise to learn that the homework sets weren’t burdensome. Perhaps because this teacher read and graded all the homework, or perhaps because he knew exactly how much homework the kids needed in order to master the concepts, he gave small problem sets. My other niece, whose teachers never so much as glanced at anything the kids did outside class, would be assigned dozens of problems every night; she’d sit and slave over her math and no one at the school would give it a second thought. As a result, the stuff they turned in was “the crappiest sh** you’ve ever seen.”

The kids in this teacher’s class, because their teacher was a collecter and correcter, learned to produce neat, readable solution set with the answers circled.

So:

• formative assessment

• distributed practice

• cumulative practice

I would put money on it the kids in this man’s class have some of the highest math achievement coming out of a public school Algebra 1 course in the country.

They better have, since it'll be 9 long months before any of them looks at the inside of a math book again.


the Gambill method