Glashan Public School is undergoing schedule changes designed to help students ease the transition to high school, according to the school board.
By the start of the 2010-2011 school year, Glashan and all intermediate schools in the Ottawa Carleton District School Board will have incorporated a 100-minute continuous block of subjects taught by the same teacher.
Glashan principal Scott Martin says the difference for his school will be bringing classes together that are currently separate and standardizing the 100-minute block with a single teacher.
“The change basically is that we will have our language blocks delivered in consecutive time as opposed to different times throughout the day,” he says. “Although some classes may already have this model, all classes will have it in September.”
Jennifer Adams, the board’s superintendent of curriculum, says learning from fewer teachers will better prepare students in Grades 7 and 8 for what they will experience at Lisgar, Glebe or other area high schools.
“It’s designed so that students in the elementary level don’t have more teacher contacts during the week than they actually get when they’re in secondary (school),” she says.
These language blocks are delivered in students’ main language, whether that is English or in French immersion, with a wide range of subjects covered, Martin says.
“In our literacy block we integrate mainly the history and geography, although you could integrate the dramatic arts as another subject area,” he says, adding that subjects such as science and math can be included depending on the teacher.
A school board presentation on intermediate schools in March 2009 called for limiting transitions between teachers during the school day and more specialization for students.
The difficult change comes from schools which had a “full rotary” model, in which students had six or eight periods with different teachers throughout their 300-minute school day.
“Certainly some of the schools that have had different models are finding it challenging,” she says. “That’s why we offer support . . . in developing the timetables.”
For Centretown school trustee Jennifer McKenzie, timetable challenges come back to the teacher specialization desired when students become older.
“At the intermediate level things become more complicated, teachers specialize more in their subject areas,” she says. “You have things like health and gym where you ideally want to separate the boys from the girls, so it’s just that much more complicated and more of a challenge for the principals.”
These are not the only recent changes made to scheduling. The 2009-2010 school year was the second of two years given for implementation of a new time model in elementary and intermediate schools, designed to regulate teaching times.
“There were huge variations from school to school,” McKenzie says. “Some schools did 30 minutes of math a day and some did 90 minutes of math a day, so when they go to high school they’ve got very different backgrounds.”
Adams says these changes include “flex time” every week in which schools can focus on areas with low test scores.
“That’s where as an individual school you can decide to add 60 minutes to a specific subject area,” she says. “So if you’re in an area where your literacy scores have been very low, you can add on 60 minutes of instruction of literacy.”