The school bell runs the daily routines at Mid-Missouri high schools.
It dictates when students and teachers will move from one class to the next. But how long students can sit in one class varies on whether the student goes to a school with traditional-schedule or block-schedule. Under a traditional schedule, students go to each class for roughly 45 to 55 minutes, but with block scheduling, classes are around 85 to 95 minutes and students often will rotate between two sets of 4 or 5 different classes every other day.
Columbia high schools follow a rotating block schedule, so students have 8 classes: 4 one day, 4 the next. Rock Bridge High School Principal Dr. Jennifer Rukstad said teaching on the block schedule is not the same as two days of content on the traditional schedule.
“What you would have done in two days back-to-back is not what you would do in one 95-minute period,” Rukstad said. “It somewhat helps promote a more narrow but deeper curriculum.”
For teachers at Rock Bridge like Wendy Sheehan, it means more flexibility in how to teach a lesson.
“By being able to do block schedule, we may do part of it as lecture then part of it as an activity,” Sheehan said. “There are multiple components so that by the time they leave the classroom, they thoroughly grasp that concept.”
If you travel down Highway 63 to Ashland, Southern Boone High School runs on a 7-period traditional schedule each day. The school switched to traditional from a rotating 10-class block schedule in 2012. Southern Boone Principal Dale Van Deven said by dropping the amount of classes each student takes from 10 to 7, they ended up getting more minutes in each class over the course of the year.
“When we studied (traditional scheduling), we learned that those 2150 minutes is what we were losing per every class by being in our 10-block system that we had before,” Van Deven said.
Southern Boone Language Arts teacher Dr. Karen Hamer teaches some of the upper-level classes at Southern Boone. In her experience with those students, she said the students have noticed that teachers are more organized when they do not have to prep for as many different classes because there are only 7 courses per student instead of 10.
“They could tell that their teachers were better prepared, because they weren’t scrambling to prepare as many classes,” Hamer said. “When we taught 10-block, some of our teachers had as many as five or six preps.”
According to the National Educator’s Association, block schedule gives more time for one-on-one instruction. Rukstad also pointed out block scheduling is most similar to a college schedule.
With a traditional schedule, one benefit is the repetition of content every day. Hamer also said it’s easier to keep a student’s attention span for shorter amounts of time.
Both the Columbia and Ashland administrators agreed, one type of schedule is not going to always be the best for every school. Hamer believes traditional is the best fit for Southern Boone.
“I think for a school of our size, traditional schedule makes sense, given the number of teachers that we have, given the resources that we have,” Hamer said.
For Rukstad, the choice comes down to how to teach the kids.
“What does your school, what do your teachers believe about the value of instructional methods?” Rukstad said. “It seems to work fairly well for us, it’s not perfect.”
But there is one thing every school has in common.
“Our world is ruled by the bells,” Van Deven said.