School Restructuring

3 Pages 755 Words

Six classes a day, five days week, every day the same schedule. Telephones and radios were still luxuries when high schools nationwide petrified the school day into this rigid pattern. The refrigerator and television hadn't been invented, much less the copy machine, computer, and video player. We live in a very different world now, and we know more about how students learn. Yet most contemporary high school and middle school students are still locked into the same schedule that their great-grandparents experienced when they were teenagers.
The big question here is what is wrong with the traditional six or seven period day? For starters, say critics, the pace is tough. A typical student will be in nine locations working on nine different activities in a six-and-a-half-hour school day. An average teacher must teach five classes, dealing with 125-180 students with several preparations. This frantic, fragmented schedule is unlike any experienced either before or after high school. "It produces a hectic, impersonal, inefficient instructional environment," states Gordon Cawelti (1994), limits the amount of time to go in-depth on a subject, and tends to discourage using a variety of learning activities. Opportunities for individualization of instruction and meaningful interaction between students and teachers are hard to come by. No matter how complex or simple the school subject, the schedule assigns an impartial national average of fifty-one minutes per class period. And despite wide variation in the time it takes individual students to succeed at learning any given task, the allocated time is identical for all.
Schools will have a design flaw as long as their organization is based on the assumption that all students can learn on the same schedule. In addition, since most disciplinary problems occur during scheduled transitions, the more transitions, the more problems. In my district, the principal states this as the number one disci...