High School Scheduling Experiments: Do “Design-Change” Models Work in Pandemic Times?

Much of the critical fire generated by high school scheduling changes during the COVID-19 pandemic marathon is directed at eliminating the hybrid model and driven by harried and exhausted teachers. “It doesn’t work” is the rallying cry and the obvious short-term solution is to axe what is labelled as an “inferior” model of teaching and learning. Delving more deeply into the raging issue, the source of the trouble is more complicated because it’s precipitated more by reactive pandemic timetable shifts and rooted in broader “design-change” innovations.   

The Pandemic not only turned school systems upside-down, but radically altered its priorities. Toggling back and forth between in-person and online learning became the ‘new normal’ and it has completely up-ended a whole series of ‘design-change’ plans to transform high schools. Regular video-conferencing and remote learning render some of the favoured minimally-guided teaching strategies much less effective, particularly ‘project-based-learning’ and extended group activities. Securing and sustaining student engagement means keeping lessons short and, ideally, no longer than 45 to 60 minutes.  

The more fundamental structural problem facing high schoolers– the length of the instructional periods in minimal guidance spaces—tends to escape close scrutiny. “It’s not just about headsets and webcams. That’s not the problem,” York Region parent  Shameela Shakeel  told The Toronto Star. “The problem is that the children at home are not really connected to the classrooms. There is a big disconnect.”

Two years into the pandemic, the most potentially damaging high school scheduling change has been the so-called ‘quadmester system.’  Introduced in Ontario districts as part of the public health response to COVID-19 in 2020-21, it thrusts students into compressed courses for two long periods each day over half the normal time, while shifting between in-person and online learning. It survived this year in the York public board and a few others with higher-than-average COVID-19 case counts.

School superintendents and high school principals are favourably disposed to ‘block’ schedules with longer and longer class periods. Long before the pandemic hit, they were nudging their school districts, one-by-one, over time, to abandon year-long (linear) courses, offered in 45 to 60 minute slots, normally in packages of 6 or 8 courses over the course of 36 weeks.

Design-change models in Canadian K-12 education have recently been aimed at finishing-off the conventional “Carnegie Unit,” the time-based metric for weighing the value of courses and awarding course credits. Under the Copernican model, pioneered in Canadian high schools in the 1980s, classes were taught for longer periods over the day and over semesters, normally covering one-third or one-half of the year.

The latest iteration, first piloted in Alberta in 2008-09, promoted by the University of Calgary-based Galileo Education Network, and expanded since, removes the standard instructional time requirement and allows students more time, or less time, to complete the course work. According to these Calgary faculty of education professors, the conventional full-year course model exemplifies “assembly line” education and is a “traditional and increasingly irrelevant way to organize student and teacher learning in education systems.”  

The Galileo Education “High School Flexibility Enhancement” project was conceived of as a “high school redesign process” with, it turns out, little or no evidence-based research into its actual affect on student achievement.  “Flexible blocks of learning time, credit recovery options, project-based coursework and teacher advisory groupings” are the priorities, all consistent with what used to be termed “progressive” reform.

Pandemic shifts appear to have advanced the school scheduling change movement. In the summer of 2020, British Columbia secondary school leadership teams seized the opportunity to reorganize around “learning cohorts” and, in five weeks, completely re-designed their school timetables around instructional groups with fewer classes for longer periods of time.

In preparing for the current year, B.C. school boards based their decisions on two documents which echoed Galileo “design-change” theory: a Vancouver school board white paper, prepared in April 2021 by Saskatchewan school change theorist Dean Shareski, and a Canadian education policy research article written by the Galileo Education Network consultants. Student engagement and well-being are prioritized over academic learning and timetable changes justified as a means to the larger end of secondary school transformation. 

The BCSTA “Secondary School Timetable Options” brief, for example, includes a rather skewed “Semester/Linear/Quarter” Model Comparison chart described as “a subjective overview.” Setting aside the one-sided critique of conventional structures, the chart acknowledges that full-year course schedules are still “seen as best meeting the needs of students and programs with an academic focus,” may “provide the best overall quality of learning,” and may be “more effective for intense learning opportunities.”

The “Quadmester’ model survived an onslaught of opposition in May and June of 2021, mostly emanating from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), Canada’s largest school district. Students, teachers and parents coalesced around a #No Quads/ No Hybrids” movement to rid the system of a high school schedule deemed detrimental to student learning, achievement and well-being. Excessively long classes, the “crammed curriculum,” and the accelerated pace of learning precipitated its abandonment at the TDSB and limited its forecasted growth in Ontario.

Recent teacher and parent protests against the hybrid model get it half-right. Students were hurt by the imposition of hybrid blended learning last school year and teachers have exposed its glaring flaws: split focus, clunky online platforms, irregular connections, and exhaustion resulting from ‘double duty’ teaching timetables. Deadly long periods and students completely ‘checking-out’ are of much greater concern to students and parents. 

Adopting the Quad System only compounded the problems plainly visible during the hybrid model high school scheduling experiments. Looking longer-term, design-change schedule reforms such as ‘quadmesters’ will likely have greater adverse impact. Let’s hope students and parents will not be wooed into accepting an imperfect and improvised solution introduced under crisis conditions.   

What’s changed since the Pandemic up-ended high school education?  Do previous “design-change” innovations fit the radically changed teaching-learning conditions?  Has the rapid introduction of remote learning alerted us to more of the advantages of shorter, more purposeful teaching strategies?  In the light of the pandemic, is it time to rethink high school redesign based upon experimental super-block schedules?