ABSTRACT
Conundrum: Teaching the history of “the world” in less than ninety days? A daunting task indeed! It is difficult to meet our curriculum objectives with any bell schedule, but the block format can be particularly challenging for heavy content areas such as world history. Block scheduling typically reduces instructional time by twenty to twenty-five minutes per week compared to a conventional yearlong format. Teachers already lose chunks of instructional time to the chronic interruptions in the regular school day— intermittent assemblies, pep rallies, and the weeks of spring that go missing due to standardized testing.
