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Advice from the School of Hard Blocks

If you're thinking about going on the block, consider these suggestions:

Pick a schedule that fixes the things you want to fix.

Both a 4x4 and a Block 8 or rotating schedule will offer more courses to students, for example, but if you want a smaller student-teacher ratio, then the 4x4 model makes better sense. Identify your needs, and look at what other people are doing. Borrow ideas and plans and schedules, and then modify them to fit your identified needs.

If you pick a block schedule, make a three- or four-year commitment to trying it out.

Some problems didn't even surface for us until midway through our third year. We found, for instance, that students had a higher failure rate in first-semester classes, evidently because they figured they could take the classes again in the second semester without having to go to summer school. Limiting opportunities to repeat failed courses in any one school year has addressed the issue well enough, but it was an unexpected complication for us. Surely other problems are lurking around the corner for us even now.

Check on district and state policies that might be affected.

Investigate athletic eligibility (which many states define in terms of the number of classes passed and failed), state-mandated minutes of instruction, maximum number of students that teachers can encounter in a year, etc. You can't fudge on the numbers; you'll need waivers or letters of understanding. In our case, we had to get a written agreement from the teacher union, because the block schedule put our teachers in contact with students for more minutes per day than the master agreement with the school board allowed.

Caution your teachers against trying to plan lessons too far ahead for that first year.

Everything will be so different that their planning time probably will be wasted. Instead, tell them to get a good rest that summer before they start. And take some downtime for yourself, too.

Make sure your substitute teachers understand your new schedule.

Invite your substitutes in for a discussion session in the weeks before school starts, and let them know what changes you are making. Substitutes won't have a problem if they know what's expected. And in the case of a block schedule, they're expected to teach the classes in question. Many of our regular substitutes prefer the block schedule for precisely this reason.

Limit your visitors.

Block schedules are hot now. If you decide to make the switch, you'll soon have dozens of other school leaders at your door, wanting to see for themselves how it's going. Three or four hundred visitors came to our school that first year—and took all our planning time, just when we needed it most. Resist the temptation to show off—at least during the first half of the first year. And when you do allow visitors, charge them, and use the income to send your teachers off to visit other schools. (We have charged as much as $500 for a dozen visitors.)

Watch for students who need early intervention.

In a block schedule, you don't have time to let a student "slide" for a few weeks before confronting a situation. Also, consider setting up restrictions for kids who earn enough credits to graduate early. We require, for instance, that senior English and economics be taken during the senior year. And we find many students want to stick around for the senior prom and other festivities in the second semester.

Give yourself time to change.

Twenty-five years of 50-minute classes is hard to let go of, so don't expect it all to change easily during that first semester. Consider waiving teacher evaluations and assessments for that first year so your staff will have freedom to experiment, foul up, and recover. And be prepared to deal with naysayers. Colleagues at other schools might feel threatened by your restructuring efforts. Your staff might take some hard shots as well, both from colleagues who are threatened by change and from parents who don't have enough information to understand the new schedule. It hurts when the criticism comes from friends and peers.

Recognize that you're changing more than the length of class periods.

You're also changing much of the school structure and culture. Our classes have become noisier, and our students have come to expect more activity. (When they don't get it, they let us know.) You can use statistics to evaluate the success of block scheduling, but don't ignore "soft" data dealing with the tone of the school, the contentment of students, the cleanliness of the building, or the extra time staff members take to stand and chat with kids in the hall.

Don't expect the block schedule to solve all your problems.

Switching to the block will not help the faculty lose weight, stop teenage pregnancy, or make gangs disappear. A block schedule might make some things better, but you'll still have a balance of small battles won and lost every day.