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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A colleague did his dissertation on block vs traditional schedules in VA. All kids take the same SOLs, so it was easy to compare schools across the entire state. He accounted for things like school size, location and percentage of free/reduced meals.

Traditional schedule had significantly higher achievement. [/quote]

Do you have a link to the thesis?[/quote]

It's pointless to debate the research. Very little of it exists for middle schools, and what does exist generally shows no benefit, and possibly some harm for block scheduling in MS. But what works for one school may or may not work for another. So, it's hard to extrapolate too much.

What is clear is if you're going to do this, you need complete buy-in from parents and teachers, who need to be taught how to teach it. Double lectures are a horrible use of block scheduling time...

In terms of subjects, block can be good for science, social studies, and English. It's bad for sequential disciplines like languages and math. Unfortunately in this area, languages and many math classes are taught for high school credit, so if you screw things up by moving kids to block, it has a real-world effect on their academic paths. (Spanish 1, French 1, etc. are taught in 7th grade in many middle schools here.). So, the stakes are kind of high. And generally language and math teachers oppose block scheduling.

Block kills music programs. And it will cut back on the number of minutes in IEPs, etc.[/quote]

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