In one of your articles, you mentioned that the high school level was the most resistant to the interdisciplinary approach.

I think the high school level has been the most resistant to change, period. And I think part of that is that high school teachers are certified based on subject matter certification, whereas an elementary teacher is certified as an elementary teacher-they’re not certified as a math or an English teacher. As a result, you find the elementary and middle school people more open to change than you find at the high school level.

Since that article was written, this whole country has gone into a major change at the high school level of looking at block scheduling. Five years ago, I would have never guessed that as many high schools would have adopted block scheduling as we currently see. Most high schools are scheduled at six or seven periods per day. At block schedule they’re scheduled at four periods per day.

The idea is, when you only have 50-minute periods in a school day, by the time you’ve taken attendance and reviewed what you did yesterday, there’s such limited amounts of instructional time.

When you take a block, now you basically have an hour and forty-five minutes, maybe even up to two hours in a block, you can really start getting into the depth of that subject matter much more than you can in a traditional schedule.

Also, there are fewer passing times. You’re only switching class three times a day instead of six times a day, so there’s more instructional time.

When you look at academic achievement, lecture is one mode of learning but a more effective mode is hands-on, project-based, more experiential-based learning. So we have a problem here, a dichotomy at the high school level.

A lot of times when you go into a kindergarten, you say it needs to be 1,200 square feet. And I go into the discussion as to why does that have to be 1,200 square feet because the kids in the kindergarten are much smaller than the kids in high school. Yet when we go high schools, a lot of time we’ll go around the country and find a high school classroom to be 700 or 800 square feet. Well, the problem is, at a kindergarten there is more diversity of activities: a sand box area, reading group areas and places for naps, and all these different things going on in the classroom, and as a result we need more space.

Guess what? At high schools, as they start embracing block scheduling, 700 or 800 square feet works fine if all you’re going to do is lecture to 25 kids in rows. But if you’re going to have these kids working on projects, working in teams, 800-square-foot classrooms aren’t going to do the job.

When you design classrooms for block scheduling, what types of materials and furniture do you specify?

One of the things that we’re seeing, whether it’s in the classroom or adjacent to it, is a lot of small group conference areas. In a lot of cases, we’re seeing a conference room for four to six people that may be adjacent to a classroom where groups of kids can work on a project and have a level of privacy. A lot of times for security purposes, you glass those areas in.

Instead of the desk and the chair, we’re seeing tables and chairs. What we’ve done a lot of times is relegate the technology to the back of the classroom by putting in a place for a half dozen computers.

Especially on new schools, we’re looking at floor pockets for cable hookups. We’re already working with some schools, like in Beaufort, South Carolina, where they’re beginning to issue laptop computers to all sixth graders. So this whole issue of looking at four to six computers per classroom-forget it. We need to look at a concept in which every student has a computer. And I don’t think that’s going to be a fixed computer, what that’s going to be is a laptop. So there’s been a lot of debate going on whether we should have computer labs in schools or is that just a stop gap measure. And it is.

Twenty years ago there was only one computer for every 125 students. In 1995 it went to about ten to twelve students per computer. We’re pushing a situation that by the year 2000 I think we’ll probably be at a ratio of about four students to a computer in most schools.

Just jump that one step further: Look at every kid carrying some sort of laptop whether it’s in a backpack or whatever. Think of all these kids walking in schools with laptops-they’re going to be looking for data ports in hallways, they’re going to be looking for electrical hookups in cafeterias, in libraries, media centers-all over the place. They’re going to be looking for some kind of Internet connection off a school bus. Anyplace they can plug in.

Once a decision has been made to build a new elementary school or do a major renovation of a middle school, there’s a whole programming phase that really needs to take place to really think through these kinds of issues.

“One of the things that we’re seeing, whether it’s in the classroom or adjacent to it, is a lot of small group conference areas. In a lot of cases, we’re seeing a conference room for four to six people that may be adjacent to a classroom where groups of kids can work on a project and have a level of privacy.”

How are these different instruction methods changing the way you design elementary schools?

The classic elementary school, the double-loaded corridor-those buildings do not lend themselves to doing these other methodologies.

In Mason, Ohio, near Cincinnati, they built a new middle school and switched from the junior high industrial model into a middle school philosophy.

They just built a huge elementary school of 1,200 students. It’s four schools within a school. In their school system, within a school, parents and teachers have the choice of whether they want to teach in a self-contained environment, which is the kind of environment you and I went to school in, or if they want what’s called a “looping environment,” which is where two teachers work together with a first grade class and a second grade class. They team teach and the kids are in that class for two years.

The third model is a multi-age model. Sometimes what you’re seeing is kindergarten, first and second grades in a multi-age model and that may be only for a single year-it’s almost like a non-graded type of environment.

Then there’s the grade-level team. Let’s take a second grade where three teachers work together. One may be really strong in mathematics, another in science, the third really strong in language arts. They may take 75 kids and work together to figure out at what time what kids need to be with what teacher.

In Mason, Ohio, they have three schools like this. In five years, these have gone from average schools to the top performing schools in the state. The point is that we need to build more and more choices and options within the public school itself.

Let’s take a look at space ramifications. In some cases, if you have a self-contained method what you really need are classrooms and it really doesn’t make any difference because it’s just a teacher in a classroom.

In the “looping” we have two teachers that are going to be working together, so these classrooms really need to be interconnected, possibly even a moving wall or even some way to move between those classrooms without going into the hallway.

With multi-age or a grade-level team-a lot of these elementary schools are being built now in pods and provide that flexibility. The double-loaded corridor does not provide that flexibility.

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