Teaching on a Block Schedule – Why It’s Not as Bad as You Think [Episode 149]

Rebecca 0:00
Okay, teacher friends, we’re back to another, like, kind of niche, you know, episode here. But I think this is really important to address, because I know a lot of you teach on block schedules. Okay, so we’ve been talking about how to cover all the content when you have so little time, and those of you on block schedules are the most limited in your time, especially it doesn’t matter what derivation of block you’re on, whether that’s like, semester long or A, B, I think for some reason people feel like semester long classes are at the most of a disadvantage. And that is actually not necessarily true. That’s why anyone who ever emails me asking for advice on, like, what to cut and that kind of thing, which I’m always happy to do, by the way, like, if you own, it’s not rocket science curricula of any kind, and you’re you want to know, like, Hey, I don’t think I can get this all done in one semester one year. What should I cut? Email me, Rebecca, it’s rocket science classroom.com. And let me know exactly how much time you see your students. Like, 90 minutes every day for 18 weeks, or 90 minutes every other day all year, you know? Or if it’s something funkier, give me all the details, because I will do the math with you, and then we will figure it out together. Okay? But for some reason, I think people feel like this semester block is the shortest, and that’s not always the case. So this is really for anyone on any sort of block that’s not seeing your students every day all year long. So if you do not see your students every day all year long, this episode is for you, and we are going to talk about really practical things. We’re going to talk about some of the negatives, but also some of the positives that you do have, and how you need to kind of lean into those positives to make the most of this, because you do definitely have less time. Okay, so let’s get into it. This is secondary science simplify, a podcast for secondary science teachers who want to engage their students and simplify their lives. I’m Rebecca Joyner from it’s not rocket science. As a high school science teacher turned curriculum writer, I am passionate about helping other science teachers love their jobs, serve their students and do it all in only 40 hours a week. Are you ready to rock the time you spend in your classroom and actually have a life outside of it? You are in the right place, teacher friend, let’s get to today’s episode.

Context is always helpful, I feel like when talking about these situations, so I want to give a tiny bit of context before we jump in. So when I student taught, I taught at a school that was an AB semester block. I saw students every other day all year, so you had four class periods a day. Then the next school I taught at was semester blocks. So it was every day, 90 minutes for semester, and then we got new students in January. So we basically had the students for 18 weeks. The school after that, it was more traditional, 50 minutes every day all year, and we all, I think there were seven class periods, and you taught six of them. So these are all the different types of teaching experience I have. This is why I feel really confident when I write unit plans that I can do it for both traditional and block pacing. That’s why all my units include both for you guys as a reference. But always know too. I’m always basing this on a 90 and 50 minute. Some of y’all are on Semester block, and you only have 80 minutes, and y’all, every minute makes a difference. So first thing is, first, we need to do math. I want you to write out how many minutes you see your students and how many days a week you see them, and then how many weeks in the year, and then multiply all of that, and that’s going to be your maximum amount of instructional minutes. Now, if your schedule is complicated and you see them different amounts each day. What I want you to do instead is tabulate how many minutes do you see them in one week, and then multiply that by how many weeks you have them in this school year. Most schools are on nine week quarters. Some schools do trimesters. So you need to kind of look into that, and then that’s going to give you your number instructional minutes, like I told you last year, comparing my the third school I taught at to my second, I went from 9000 instructional minutes to 8100 instructional minutes. I lost 900 instructional minutes. That was a 10% loss essentially in my instructional time. So I want you to know do that math, just so we can acknowledge that like no, you actually are at a deficit here, and this is hard. Don’t expect to be able to cover as much as other people can, like you need. That’s the reality of the situation. Go back and listen to episode 147, to help you figure out what do you need to focus on? Phone a friend. Ask a co worker. Talk to someone else in your district. Ask a person who wrote your curriculum, like, if you use it’s not rocket science, like I said, email me and get advice in terms of, like, what you can cut. I’m always like, send me how many minutes you got. Send me your standards, and I’ll help you do that conversation, you know? But like, this is where it’s, I think, walk through that process in episode 147, but also get someone else’s opinion on this, who’s done this before, in terms of what you need to focus on. Okay, that’s a. First thing, you’re just gonna have to narrow down what you do. You’re not gonna be able to probably get through the standards like someone who has 50 minutes every day all year. Now let’s acknowledge some of the hard things, and then we’ll talk about some of the positives. Okay, I think one of the hardest things about this kind of schedule is it just, I don’t know how else to say it. It just sucks extra when someone is absent, when someone misses a 50 minute class period, it’s like, okay, you missed like 10 minutes of notes and like half of a lab. When someone misses a 90 minute class period, it feels like they missed a third of a unit. You just get through so much stuff in 90 minutes, and you’d be like, shouldn’t just be basically double. I don’t know why. It just always feels like more. And so when someone’s absent, it feels like they get so far behind. So for that conversation, I want you to know that in two weeks, I have a podcast episode coming out about absences and absenteeism and how to deal with those so stay tuned for that, and I will remedy your absent problem when we get there, here is a kind of positive though to kind of combat that. Typically, when someone is on a block schedule, they’re only going to have about four classes that they’re focusing on. And typically, your students in those four courses, one of those, at least sometimes two, is probably some sort of elective. So they only really have two or three core classes they’re probably working on at a time. Now, I know your AP students are probably different because they’re out of control, but we’re talking about the general population here, and so I think one of the nice things about block is that you are not competing with as many other classes for their attention and for their homework time. So y’all know, I am anti homework, and I don’t assign it. I have a whole podcast episode about this. I’ll link in the show notes, but I feel better about assigning homework when teaching on a block schedule, if you really have to, because I think it’s a natural way that you can kind of reclaim some of that lost time in terms of instructional minutes. And also, they’re not getting homework from seven teachers. They’re getting homework from maximum four, but most likely two or three, because one or two of those classes is an elective, and so there’s less for them to do. I think another thing that’s a benefit when you’re on block and they only have like, four classes at a time is they have less teachers that they need to see that are taking up potential tutoring time. So hopefully they can really focus on you. Now. I know if you’re like, Well, we have a B, so they do have eight classes, you know, and I know that’s kind of a different situation, but they have more time between seeing you, so hopefully more opportunities to come in and catch up with you before they see you again and you move on to new content. I actually like semester block better than I like AB block all year, because I like the narrowed down nature of like you only have these four things to focus on. But anyway, I digress. I think you can just have a little bit better. There’s just a little bit more capacity for homework on a block schedule and a little bit more capacity for coming in and getting that extra help, because they have, you know, two days before they’re going to see you again, type thing. So I think those are kind of some positives that you can kind of focus on. Hopefully you don’t want to do as much remediation. You can push all that remediation to tutoring hours, and then that’s a way you can reclaim some of your class time too. I think for me personally too, when I taught on block, I only had three preps max at one time, so I felt like I had much better attention that I could even give my courses. I actually felt like it really helped me as a teacher. I loved, loved having a 90 minute planning period, that is everything compared to 50 minute. So I think for me as a teacher, it was easier in the actual class time, it’s harder, but like on the prep time, it felt a lot easier than when, you know, I had six classes and a 50 minute planning period and five preps of those six classes. So I think that is a benefit there, too. Now, like we talked about in episode 147 you will have to cut stuff out, because you will not have as much time. This is where knowing your core values is really important in terms of knowing what to cut. I think, personally, a really practical thing you can do, especially on these block schedules, is cut out a lot of the reinforcing practice and make that homework, which, again, I hate but they’ll have more capacity to hopefully do it. And then cut out extension, resources, web quests, videos, you know, that kind of thing. That way you have more time for labs. Because the one beautiful part about 90 minute classes is the labs, you have so much more time to get it done. Now I know if you’re like, Well, we’re on a, b, so it sucks, because we get data, and then I don’t see them for two days. How do we do it? I get that, but I think there’s, there is not really any lab, except for the pglu lab from AP Bio that like bacterial transformation that can’t be done. The data can’t be collected in 90 minutes. That’s like the one tricky lab. But data can be collected in 90 minutes. You have plenty time to get through that. You can finish the analysis and conclusion on another day. And that doesn’t have to be back to back. I know there are labs like, where you need to be getting data every day over a period of time. I’ve done that before, too, on an AB schedule, like my gummy bear osmosis, where, like, you have your day one data and then you have to add salt and then do day two. And you know, you’re taking all these different measurements, but that is where what you do is you have different schedules on different days. And some classes do the day two measurement, the other classes do the day three measurement. You take pictures when they miss what they miss. You just kind of have to get a little funkier there. But I do think block schedule is better for doing labs, and that’s where I think, though it really helps to focus on less labs, but better, which is something I’m really passionate about, and so check out my lab audit. It is a podcast episode and a free resource I have walking you through how to audit your labs to make sure the ones you’re doing are really worth your time, because, again, you have less time, so we don’t want to be wasting it, you know, doing extension things and labs that are like, fine, we only want to do the best labs now. Five more things I love about block schedule to hopefully kind of fire you up, because, like I’ve said in the last two episodes, I cannot create more time for you. You will have to narrow in on what’s most important to cover, and you will have to pump yourself up. That’s what we talked about last week, in terms of like, being okay and not feeling guilty about not getting it through, through it all. But hopefully these five things will help make you feel a lot better about your block schedule and not stress that you have so much less class time. So I think the first thing that’s epic about block schedule is you can change it up lots Okay, within 90 minutes. I have a freebie called the anatomy of a class period cheat sheet. It’s 50 minutes on one side and 90 minutes on the other. And I kind of show you how I break up that class period so you don’t get it. Doesn’t get boring. Do it every 15 minutes. Change it up. Do something new. I love it. There’s plenty of time to do a prime time if you’re not doing a bell ringer and you teach on a 90 minute class period, do it. You need it to start structuring your class period. I’m obsessed with that, and I love that we can all in one day. We can have a bell ringer, we can have a quiz, we can take notes, we can do a lab. We can go back to notes, have an activity. There’s so much you can do, and I love how much we can get through and really focus on one topic at a time in that longer period. The second thing I love is, like I said, the labs, I think it’s way easier to do labs. Sometimes. On my 50 minute schedule, it took us four days to get through a lab because we just didn’t have the time. We did chip away at it and it just it gets tricky to keep a lab and all the materials out for that many days. Block schedule. It’s so much easier just to say, like, okay, we’re not this out in one day, maybe overflow into day two, but that’s pretty much it. The third thing I love is, and my third really specific recommendation is, do bigger units so you have tests less often. Okay, so, for example, a lot of people in anatomy will test every single body system, and then, like, also after tissues and stuff, and you have, like, 12 or 13 little units, and that’s fine on a 50 minute schedule because you’re testing probably every other week, or maybe every three weeks. But when you’re on a 90 minute schedule, it makes it works out that you have a test literally every single week. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to administer it, and I don’t want to grade those. So I recommend chunking up your units and making them larger so you’re not testing as often. In anatomy, I have seven units, because I like to test multiple systems together, and so students have to see the integrations of the systems, and then it frees you up to not have so many tests so frequently you’re having. You know, when I did semester block, it was seven tests over the course of 18 weeks. So it divided it up a lot easier. You got to every two to three weeks you had a test, as opposed to every single week if you have 1012, 13 units. The fourth recommendation I have, which I think is a nice way to do this, is combine your review and your test day. So I hate review days, but I know my students need them and like them. So typically I would have like when I taught 50 minute class periods, a 50 minute review day and then a 50 minute test day, and the 50 minute review day is just long. It just drags, unless you’re doing review stations, which I will link how to do those in the show notes, because I do love doing those. But on 90 minutes, I would do it all in one class period. I would do a 30 minute review and then leave an hour for the test. All my tests are written for 50 minute class periods, so there’s still buffer time there. And I just like that. It’s all in one day. It’s fresh in their minds. The review is before going into the test. And yeah, it just feels like you’re not wasting so much time having so many review days. Now, when I write out my unit plans, I build it out. So typically it’s an entire review day and an entire test day. But I put like, you don’t need that on the 90 minutes at all. You do not need that. But I know a lot of people get freaked out about the combo day, but I love a review and test combo day, so I highly recommend that on the block schedule. And then the last thing I’ll say is a specific tip for those of you on Semester block. This is, if you’re on a B, it’s different, but if you see your student. Experience for only a semester, and then they move on from you. You need to try new stuff. Here’s the thing. Here’s what’s so awesome. If it sucks, if it’s terrible, who cares? You get to restart again in three to four months. I absolutely loved that. My first year I was on my first two years I was on Semester block schedule, and it’s like I had double the experience I really had four years and two because I got to restart in January both of those years, whole new group, try new things, run through all the labs again another time, and make changes. It was just the best. I really, really loved that. And I felt like I could take greater risks, whether that’s with classroom management or my grading strategies and grading way less and see what happens. Because, okay, it went terrible. I’ll set up my grade book different next year or next semester. I mean, as opposed to having to wait, you know, nine months to start over all again. So I highly recommend taking some risks. That is one of the benefits of teaching on Semester block. So I hope this episode kind of pumped you up. You know, I don’t have a solution for you having way less time. I just don’t, but hopefully you can focus on some of the positives of being on a block schedule, especially a semester block schedule, and you’re feeling better about that this school year. So leave a review today if you haven’t yet. If you are a block schedule teacher, and you’re feeling a lot better about it after this episode, and if you want to check out any of the links I mentioned in the show notes, you can find those at, it’s not rocket science classroom.com/episode, 149

All right, teacher friends, that wraps up today’s episode. If you’re looking for an easy way to start simplifying your life as a secondary science teacher, head to It’s not rocket science classroom.com/challenge. To grab your classroom reset challenge. And guess what? It’s totally free. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I’ll see you here next week. Until then, I’ll be ready for you. Teacher friend. You.