High School Workout

Many students wake up before the sunrises to begin their commute to school, and then spend several hours sitting in class listening to instructions and then return home where hours of homework are waiting to be completed, such as; writing, reading, studying, and many other assignments. The evening often seems like it doesn’t contain enough hours to complete the tasks at hand, leaving students overwhelmed. Gaining a high school education paired with the drive to excel creates enough anxiety, especially when not given the necessary time needed to complete assignments, and this doesn’t even consider the experience of students under additional stressors such as taking higher level classes, playing sports, having jobs or home responsibilities.

The entire education system has created a pressure cooker for students and staff,” says Denise Pope, senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success, which is a program that promotes students wellbeing and engagement in school, “School is now all about the grades, it’s all about the test, the homework, and it’s really just a lot of jumping through hoops.” A block schedule would greatly alleviate many of these pressures. Administrators and school board leaders must take the time to research the diverse scheduling alternatives available and assess how each one will affect their programs, how they could best decrease class size, disperse educational resources, increase use technology, promote professional development, curriculum, and school climate. A block schedule would increase student as well as teacher performance and

“As early as the 1950s, educational reformers were proposing alternatives to the traditional school day schedule to maximize benefits for students and teachers” (Queen & Isenhour, 1998). A block schedule allows teachers more time to improve and implement learning styles and “Students benefit from a multitude of instructional strategies used to address the variety of ways in which they learn.”(Rettig & Canady, 1996; Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, 1995). Some think there is greater advantage to the traditional fifty five minute schedule because it equals a total of one hundred and sixty five hours during the school year where a block schedule only contains one hundred and thirty five hours of eighty minutes in the classroom, but many studies show that students benefit from a less fragmented schedule where students can receive uninterrupted instruction. “Teachers found the use of cooperative learning essential to the high school's move to a block schedule of four eighty-minute periods. Both faculty and students felt the cooperative format made a significant difference in realizing the potential of the double-sized periods. The block schedule allowed the high school to gain an additional week-and-a-half of instructional time over the school year.” explains the American Association of School Administrators as they prove that a block schedule should be implemented