Change culture, then — maybe — the high school schedule
To be a high school teacher is to be an educator, therapist, lifecoach, surrogate parent, lawyer, college and career counselor, referee ... All that, and you must remain a reflective and collaborative lifelong learner. History is rewritten. Theories are disproved. Pluto ceases to be a planet. Chalkboards are replaced by whiteboards then by Smart boards. Smartphones are your worst enemy, or best friend, depending on the day and the lesson. “Kids today” change tomorrow.
And in the constant evolution that is education, if you started your teaching career in Stamford only 15 years ago, you would have so far lived, learned, and taught your way through four reinventions of the high school schedule. With each, necessity dictated that you relearn how to reach your students, depending on the time of day or length of time you would now be seeing them.
This is why the proposed move to yet another schedule has been met with resistance. It’s an old joke in education that we love to inflict on teachers what we tell them is “bad teaching!” A professional development session might instruct teachers not to read, lecturestyle, to students from PowerPoints (delivered by an “expert” who reads the entire time from a PowerPoint). And any schedule change, with murky rationale, is no different. “Why are we doing this?” students ask. If you can’t answer, you’ve lost the lesson.
Teachers are concerned that if we move from seeing students daily to every other day there will naturally be a negative impact on their ability to retain information, and ours to reinforce or buildon the previous day’s lesson. Studies of the adolescent brain have shown time and again that teens learn better when information is presented in short bursts repetitiously and sequentially over time, a clear problem if the periods all become alternateday long blocks. And, the potential change cuts 12 hours of instructional time per class, yearly. What happens to that lost learning?
Our only professional development on “how to teach in the block” focused on using the first part of class for a brief lecture then giving the rest of the time over for student practice. We cannot take our current lesson plans and “drop” them as doubles into the blocks, because they would not fit this model. So what do we cut, from our district curriculum, and our College Board approved AP curriculum?
Under the current schedule, a student who passes their classes each year would accrue 28 credits by graduation (and the state Department of Education has just upped the graduation requirement from 20 credits to 25). But many aren’t passing, failing entire courses, and entire years. The hope is that by imposing an eighth class on students, this can be mitigated. But the root issue is not being addressed: failure.
Nor is why students fail. There are those who don’t attend class at all, and those who sit in classes all year but can’t get to a passing grade. In both instances, knowledge isn’t being accessed. Why? In everincreasing numbers, our students come to Stamford without having experienced traditional schooling, many having worked fulltime. But students who’ve spent their entire lives here aren’t necessarily better off. Many enter high school without attaining literacy in the core subjects, and the social promotion stops here.
We readily agree that a change might positively provide students with opportunities to engage in distancelearning, internships, and workstudy opportunities. But teachers remain gravely concerned about block scheduling as it cuts curriculum, and even more importantly forces our most vulnerable populations to buy into 88 minutes of instruction when 48 is already a struggle.
As the conversations around block scheduling continue, what it can and cannot accomplish and whether it is a workable model for our high schools, we will be there and make our voices heard. In truth, our most important role as educators is to speak up for the needs of our students while modeling how they might learn to become their own best advocates. And more than any new schedule, new school, or new initiative, what we need — what we are asking for, for our students and ourselves — is a culture shift as a district. Let’s move forward to a place where failure is unacceptable, and we work as one to address the causes, put programs in place to prevent it, and banish the idea that any student should spend an entire year, let alone quarter, failing without intervention or assistance.