On Tuesday, April 13, the Aragon faculty voted to approve a proposal to implement modified block schedule in the 2012-2013 academic year. The decision reflected months of deliberation and discussion extending back to the middle of the fall semester.
In contrast to the full block schedule currently in place at San Mateo High School, the modified block schedule, which will replace Aragon’s current traditional schedule, consists of a 7-period day on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. However, 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th period class will be held on Wednesday, while 2nd, 4th and 6th will be held on Thursdays with a 1:24 p.m. dismissal time.
The initial impetus behind the modified block schedule first arose from the Aragon Strategic Committee (ASC), a group comprised of various Aragon faculty and staff members representing different academic disciplines. As Principal Pat Kurtz notes, “It’s a committee that started many years ago [that] wasn’t active for a year or two…it was to look at instructional issues that were taking place in the school…that were coming out in curriculum and how [to] make changes in the school to meet the needs of students and faculty.”
Kurtz adds that a need for greater “teacher collaboration” and “support time for students” in conjunction with the fact that the traditional schedule did not facilitate this led the committee to reassess the current bell schedule in late fall of 2011 and explore alternative options in the early spring of this year. She says, “[The ASC] presented at a faculty meeting, just talking in general about [whether] there a need to move [toward greater teacher collaboration], and it came out that most people were in favor of looking at a different bell schedule. And so we then brought it back to the ASC. We talked about it again and different schedules that we could look at.”
Physics teacher Steve Ratto commended the collaborative nature of the process to change the schedule, saying, “I’ve heard things at other schools where they haven’t done that. I’m happy that here they’ve allowed the teachers to kind of spearhead this and be a part of it at the forefront. Our principal, Ms. Kurtz, pretty much said guys I’m putting this on you … You tell me what you want; I’m not going to force it down your throat because you’re going to have to be the ones to do it.”
Yet in addressing the lack of student involvement in the decision to move to a block schedule, Kurtz comments, “I think the ASC talked about [student input]. But the time frame for making the change was very short. And most of the issues deal with teachers. It’s a change in strategy. For students, you’re going to get the same curriculum, whether you got it with the schedule that we had this year or the schedule that we had last year.”
With the schedule all but set to become the default schedule for the 2012-2013 academic year, responses have been invariably mixed from different disciplines.
Ratto says of the modified block schedule, “[The science department] loves it. We love having more time because it gives us the chance to do more in that period so I don’t have to set up something, break it down and set it up again. Sometimes in 50 minutes we have to get through everything, so it’s more ‘try this and tell me what’s happening,’ when with longer time periods I can ask the same sort of question but ask it in the form of ‘how could I get this to happen?’ And then you have to explore to try to get that to happen.”
Reflecting on her time as a member of the faculty at Hillsdale High School, which also operates under a modified block schedule, AP English teacher Jennifer Wei notes that, “At Hillsdale what I did was I collaborated most closely with a history teacher. And we would do lessons that were totally in sync, more or less. We were more or less in sync. So we’d study Lord of the Flies, they would study World War II. We would be teaching All Quiet on the Western Front, they’d be teaching World War I … So it was a lot of that cross over; it enabled us to make curriculum that made a lot more sense to students.”
Yet she concedes, “Trying to focus for 90 minutes is [difficult]. I think some of the reasoning for the 90 minute period is [it] prepares you for college when you have 90 minutes to two hours periods and sometimes four hour labs. I think that’s a little artificial because while you are sitting in lecture for 90 minutes, you’re also going to those classes twice a week and not four times a week.”
Looking to the future, the faculty and staff will revisit the schedule change in January of 2013 and at the conclusion of the school year. In the meantime, Kurtz notes, “I would hope that everyone has an open mind, and that we’re going to try it. If we [elect to] go back to [the traditional schedule], we can go back to it. But as I’ve said, if you go around looking at school schedules, you’ll find very few that are traditional.”
