Although the activities are often prescribed we don’t read directly from the manual or follow it like a script. I prefer to think of it as prescribed rather than scripted.

These are my concerns with a scripted curriculum and I’d be curious to know how it is working for you. I’ve never used one so I don’t have a sense of how much teachers can individualize to meet the needs of their students.

What curriculum are you using?

Hi Jenny,

The script continues. The concept is that of a spiral curriculum where skills and concepts are returned to – over and over again, across grade level.

http://gregcruey.blogspot.com/2007/12/spiral-curriculum.html

If half the class doesn’t “get” compare and contrast as a skill, or if they don’t understand fully what it means to generalize by the end of Day Five, you move on anyway. Both those things will be taught again – probably soon.

Teaching to mastery THIS TIME is not necessarily a goal. And the hardest thing for teachers to do when they first have to teach a spiral curriculum is to simply move on when almost no one “got it” this time. It’s tempting to hang around on Thursday’s lesson for three or four days. When you get caught, the central office’s monitoring team may put your pacing guide through the shredder and feed you the little strips that come out…

If, week after week this or that child never “gets it,” you refer them for interventions outside the Tier I reading block.

I hope your boss is still asking that question!

This is a key question for any school that is seeking to improve. Yes, that is a tough question to answer, but answering that question should be the main task of anyone in charge of quality. What if the script is not working?

LOL. I think she does still ask that question. But with many teachers where the answer to that might be “no,” we don’t necessarily get to that question anymore. If an administrator walks into a second grade room and the teacher isn’t using the script, insubordination becomes a more measurable symptom of incompetence and makes the problem easier to quantify.

If I am on script, we can go on to look at how well I doing on particular tasks or how prepared I am, etc. The script is something of an equalizer. The difference between a first year teacher and a veteran nearing retirement is minimized to some extent.

Of course, there’s also still the question of whether THE SCRIPT itself is working…

I fear better answers are simply more expensive – more educated professionals with fewer students. I’ve heard good things about language programming in Sweden and certainly it’s not a script.

How scripted? We start our fifth grade reading each day with 10 to 15 minutes of spelling. All 25 words this week have a prefix (either sub, super, over, or under). We had two specific words to point out to the kids that are commonly misspelled (I don’t remember them at the moment). Then today the kids had to use at least three of the spelling words to write a journal entry about something they wanted to do.

We do spelling first because the law in our state requires a 60 minute reading block for 5th graders. We have 90 minutes, and when the spelling is not phonics related (like this week) having it first means we can still say we have a 60 minute block without including the spelling in that calculation.

From spelling we are in the habit of moving to our concept web. The web starts on day one with a design created by the curriculum. On day two the kids start adding ideas to it. We spend about 10 minutes on that. It builds background knowledge and makes life connections.

Today, after the web, students were groups in to small groups and they read the story (seven or eight pages this week on kids with cerebral palsy) aloud in the groups. (Yesterday during this time the followed along as the story played on a CD, with stops for discussion – so this is a second reading). At the end of this time the kids answered the reader responses questions as a group. While this was going on I circulated from group to group to monitor while the general ed teacher pulled students one by one from their groups for a one minute cold reading fluency test that we do each week. The process took about 20 minutes.

At the end of this process the kids spent about 10 minutes looking over a selection test we’ll give tomorrow. About half of it is vocabulary.

The skill this week has been generalization and we had a discussion time to model the difference between a generalization and more specific statements that don’t qualify as generalizations.

We played a game with vocabulary cards. The words are placed face down on index cards, the definitions are face down on index cards. The kids turn over two cards and them put them face down again. When they can pick a word and it’s definition, they keep the pair. One with the most pairs wins.

We copied an essential question from the board and speculated on an answer for it in our reading journals.

The order can be shifted around if you like. There’s grammar, but it gets down outside the reading block. There is not an actual script per se to read. But the particular activities and exercises are “non-negotiable” according to our central office.

We monitor fluency, testing each child every two or three weeks. We have a weekly selection test. We have a unit test after five weeks; that test evaluations the sills being taught without reference to the stories we read.

For the Tier I reading block, scripted is a misnomer, I suppose. It’s guided, but we express it in our own words.

The interventions on the other hand, 30-45 minute sessions outside the reading block, have chunks of actual script you read through. Interventions are designed to match up with what’s happening in the Tier I block. And a big selling point for this curriculum is that it is designed to be a single product that lets you have reading and interventions together in a single package, along the lines of the Richard Allington suggests I mention here:

http://gregcruey.blogspot.com/2007/12/response-to-intervention-new-model-for.html

I find a curriculum of this nature more palatable in reading, at this grade level, than I would with English Lit in high school or with middle school social studies.

Our math curriculum, the University of Chicago’s Everyday Math program, is much the same…

http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/