I got this email:
Hey Ben,
At my middle school we used to have a modified block where we saw the kids two out of every three days for 65 minutes. Now we have the kids for 45 minutes every day. What a difference in retention and achievement! Our kids are doing so much better, whether they’re in CI classes or traditional textbook – grammar classes.
Now the other elective teachers would like to do a modified block where we see the kids for 4 days a week with two days being blocks of 90 minutes. So on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays, we see all kids for 45 minutes, then on Tuesday we see half of our classes for 90 minutes and on Wednesday the other half of our classes for 90 minutes. Now we’re concerned about how that might affect their achievement. Would you be willing to ask the members of the blog if they’ve tried this and how it worked?
Personally, I think with TPRS it could be cool. I could do a story and a reading in the same day, or I could do a story for the first half and the “Friday” song idea that you just mentioned for the second half – something CI but highly engaging also.
Any help you could give me would be great!
My response: I did this for two years at East High School. Not bad. GREAT for reading classes. Look at my “Weekly Schedule New (2011)” in the categories list here and you will see how those W/Th 90 min. classes lend themselves to great longer reading classes. Just check that suggested schedule for organizing the three steps into a nice tight week and you’ll know what I mean. Plus, it has the whole Bloom’s taxonomy thing going, which administrators get so excited about. So, in my opinion, this schedule is almost ideal for TPRS high school classes. I don’t know about middle school. Probably not.