How do you run your school chess club?

I would recommend the first 30 minutes be used for a lesson. Then the last hour can be used for play.

If you're looking for instructional material, ChessKid offers a free chess curriculum for parents and coaches. From the website link, you can  download a free sample but you'll want to send an email to get the full curriculum, a 550-page PDF.

Our HS club also meets once a week for 90 minutes, during the winter (about four months).  Here's what we do.

We elect officers at the 2nd meeting.  They help set the schedule for the season, which usually includes a variety:  a 3-week slow tournament, a few 3-round Game/15 tournaments, a speed tournament, a bughouse tournament, a 2 vs 2 long game session (usually earlier in the season, pairing a vet with a newbie, I instruct the vet to teach the newbie "everything you know about chess"), one computer night where everybody has to have/get a laptop and someone (officer?) leads them on a chess tour of all the good chess websites online.  Etc.

Early on in the season, I have all the players (who can) play in the "Online Club Championship", a slow tournament (1 move every 3 days) at chess.com.  You can design custom "medals" for the top three finishers, and I do.  (Past medals were Lord of the Rings, Marvel heroes, Harry Potter them, and stylized school logos.)  It takes a few steps: 1.Send me your online name 2.I send out chess.com Invites, then 3.Respond to your online invite by the tourney start deadline to be in the tourney.  It takes work to set up, but once it starts, you can forget about it, and the students will daily be thinking chess for two months.  Good investment.

When I have energy, I also set up an online tactics contest, either at chesstempo.com, chess.com, lichess.com, chessgym.net or similar.  Players send me a screenshot of their tactics score and # of problems solved after the contest start date, then another screenshot before the contest end date.  I rank them by 1) score and 2) number of problems attempted, then average the two.   It helps to have some sort of prestige prize (top three displayed during the season?), and actual prize at the end.  Delegate this to an officer if you can.  (Delegate everything if you can!)

Concur with Brother7 above - Lesson, followed by play is a good way to go.

We attend a couple tournaments, and we play in a league against other schools, the top five in our club "make Varsity" in league, and the league awards nice All-Star medals and plaques, so that adds fun & spice to the club.

Good luck and have fun!

Thank you for the suggestions. I hope to use some of these with my team.

I don’t think it’s necessary to have too much coaching - 5/10 minutes per session is fine. 30 minutes would be absolutely insane.

I would definitely suggest running some kind of tournament whether it be all play all, or Swiss, something where they can see how they’re doing - if they’re only playing friendlies they will quickly get bored/antsy/. 

I think it depends on the goal of the club. If chess improvement is the goal, then a structured lesson of reasonable length is desirable. From the OP, "I am looking for any input... on how they have structured their scholastic chess clubs to improve the players’ abilities, without losing the fun aspect of actually playing games". My reply in post #2 was intended to address those specific desires.

The OP mentioned that it's a high school club, implying members are age 14-18. A 30-minute lesson is surely tolerable at that age. And it's only 1/3rd of the entire 1.5 hour session. If one thinks 30 minutes is too long, then perhaps 20-minutes is a reasonable compromise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss-system_tournament

Your post is rather general.  But good for you for starting a chess club.

I ran a chess club for the past 2 years, and I don't think I could have kept the club going without a clear goal for the club.

My goal was for the club to participate in a specific local scholastic chess tournament. I view a chess club like sports. E.g. if the school's football team doesn't complete, then it removes the motivation for training and practice. Plus, it removes a lot of the fun too.  Same with a chess club.

We record results of games played during practice and have a ranking system. This has been a great motivator for our students. My team is younger than high school, so they are using chesskid.com. I set up chesskid challenges for them, such as attempt X puzzles or complete X lessons in a certain time period. I also set up two chesskid fast tournaments per month. This gives the kids motivation to practice outside of club meetings. A lot of the kids hated doing puzzles until I set up a contest. Just by doing a lot of puzzles they saw improvement and do them on their own now.

All the practice motivators have been helpful, but the single best thing we've done is participate in scholastic team tournaments. Out of about 35 kids I've taken to tournaments, 34 were hooked and wanted to do it again. We focus a lot on the team, which means during practice after you win you show your teammate where they went wrong so someone on another team doesn't do the same thing to them at the next tournament. 

Please be kind to tell how to organize a correspondence tournament for kids on chess.com. Thank you very much.

Email [email protected] and I'd be happy to share with you sample curriclum to use.

I an interested in what school based chess coaches use for a ranking system for their clubs.  In my high school club (1960s) I think we all started with 500 points and then added 10% of your opponent's total if you won and subtracted 5% of your opponent's total if you lost.  What systems do you use?

Creb351, we have a volunteer(s) who operate a free rating system here in the Pacific NW USA, and it's one of the contributors to scholastic chess growth here.

Our team just plays matches and we coach each other ourselves our actual leader does a recap and have people who are good "challenge" for chairs.

Boards*

I think its better to learn chess at ur own pace, ,own speed, own time, like from channels :

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC99iLm4lpawrQrJJPV3qyJQ?view_as=subscriber

This is a very cool idea! When I was in school, there was something similar. We just met after school to play. And once a year there were competitions between schools. It was very interesting. By the way, I studied in a special school where there were a lot of tasks. In order to have enough time for chess, I did a little cheating. I found  https://www.rush-my-essay.com/buy-college-essays/. They wrote all my essays with perfect structure and grammar. And I got good grades.