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From the Headmaster
Arguably the biggest question in college prep schools today is how to work more “higher level thinking” skills into each student’s educa- tionalday. Thesearetheskillsthat gobeyondknowing factsand for- mulas. They are the analytical and creative problem-solving skills — questioning, evaluating, compar- ing. applying, pulling apart and putting together elements of a problem in new ways.
Good colleges, and the business andprofessionalworlds, requirehigherlevelthink- ing. In Advanced Placement classes, our students do very well with these skills. Our goal is to extend these skills to more students, many of whom might excel if they had more time to learn.
We know more now than we did a decade ago about how people learn, how they think, and what they forget. We know we need var- ied teaching techniques which lead, in turn, to a need for more class time.
The cry for “more class time” is as old as the cry for better-educated students. Generally, educators have meant “more hours,” not necessarily “a different allotment of the existing time.” I want to talk a little about how time can be repackaged.
Recently — mainly in the past 5 to 10 years — many schools have dropped the traditional 6 or 7 period day and are combining longer blocks of time. A student takes fewer classes at once but stays in the class for, say, 70 or 90 minutes. The terms you gener- ally hear are “block scheduling” or “alternative scheduling.” Manyvariationsonthethemeexistbut school staff feedback is almost uniformly positive, according to a 1995 report from the Association of California School Administrators.
As a teacher myself, I can understand why. When we try to improve teaching by moving away from the typical format, we often find we can’t complete the lesson in a typical class period. The traditional teach- ing style involves a lecture and student response. A more contemporary style involves moving students
through a series of stages in which their understanding deepens, doing so by engaging their minds in a variety of ways.
A successful teaching period includes some essential steps. We must awaken the students’ interest, help them link the new concepts to things they already know, demon- strate the learning or the activity, and so forth. Much of this introduc- tory work would not need to be repeated if the students could stay with the task longer. They could
spend more time actually working with the new information. They would be less likely to forget.
Two studies in particular, one conducted by Harvard University of a pilot program in Massachusetts, and a follow-up study involving seven specially selected high schools, demonstrate positive learning outcomes with block scheduling.
About 40 percent of California’s high schools are now working with a non-traditional schedule, or are adoptingone.Theyadvisea periodofstudyingand data collection, so that changes in schedules can be fashioned as a support for changes a school desires in its program.
Woodside Priory School’s faculty voted over- whelmingly last spring to begin this process. This fall we take our first step, with the help of teaching work- shops and a schedule that provides each teacher with a 70-minute “block class” every seventh day. We will be collecting input from parents, students and faculty throughout the fall as we adjust to and evaluate this initial effort.
Our Class of 1996 set a high standard for excel- lence. The SAT scores, the Advanced Placement results, and the college acceptances all indicate that we have some very capable higher-level thinkers. We will be watching throughout the fall to see whether our experiment with time enhances higher-level thinking opportunities for all of our students.
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The cry for “more class time” is as old as the cry for better- educated students.