Scripted lessons are replacing DIY teaching: Will kids learn more?

Frustrated by low test scores, more schools are using structured, scripted lessons, writes Holly Korbey in TES.

Photo: Success for All Foundation

There's evidence that some curricula, such as University of Florida Literacy Institute Foundations and Success for All, improve reading skills, she reports. Scripting also makes teaching much easier for novice teachers.

But scripting is controversial. Critics say it deprives experienced teachers of autonomy, stifles creativity and may contribute to people leaving the profession.

"Eighty per cent of American teachers surveyed in the 2022 RAND American Educator Panel, for example, said they developed class material on their own," writes Korbey. "The average teacher spends 12 hours a week building lessons outside of work hours, which teachers find unsustainable."

And many aren't very good at it. Schools are trying to move to "high-quality instructional materials (HQIM)," rather than adding curriculum design to teachers' jobs, she writes. "Nearly all the states that have seen reading scores improve recently - including Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama - have changed state law to encourage districts to choose from approved lists of HQIM."

Louisiana has invested heavily in training teachers in how to use high-quality curriculum effectively and help develop materials, she writes.

Michele Caracappa wrote about adapting scripted curricula in response to a 2024 Hechinger/Chalkbeat story, “Should teachers customize their lessons or just stick to the ‘script’?”

In her first year of teaching fifth grade, she pieced together her own curriculum, Caracappa writes. It was "chaos."

Then she became a first-grade teacher at Success Academy, which was using a structured, scripted program, Success for All. Using the "road map and resources," Caracappa saw her students make "rapid academic gains," she writes.

Teachers worked together to analyze what was effective in the program and replace the parts that weren't working well., she writes. "When teachers adapt and modify a shared curricular and instructional program, they should do so in conversation and community with their broader team, engaging in regular dialogue about how student learning outcomes inform the shifts they make, and regularly reflecting on what’s working and what’s not."

"Shared, high-quality instructional materials have the potential to make an enormous positive difference – for both students AND teachers," she concludes. "But not if they sit on the shelf, and not if they are adapted so heavily they’re no longer recognizable, and not if they are expected to be implemented with rigid prescriptiveness that undermines teacher agency and common sense."