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The Impact of Scripted Literacy Instruction on Teachers and Students

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The Impact of Scripted Literacy Instruction on Teachers and Students

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Transcript of "How to escape education's death valley"

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TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational "death valley" we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.

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The Case Against Books By Teachers About Poor, Urban Schools

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The Case Against Books By Teachers About Poor, Urban Schools

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I'm not sure what my stance is on this, but I think it's an interesting topic for discussion.

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The trope of the gung-ho greenhorn in the wilds of urban public education can trace its roots back to popular classics like To Sir, With Love(1967) and contemporary films like Dangerous Minds (1995). In each, a novice teacher is able to overcome and succeed where others have failed. The stories entertain movie audiences, but it is the way in which these tales have shaped the discourse about teaching and urban schooling that is of rising concern among some critics in the education world.

There is a questionable subtext to the many teacher stories-be it in books or on film-that perpetuate the image of the lone teacher who doesn't need experience, sleep, or support from other adults in his or her school, said Roxanna Elden, a National Board Certified high-school teacher in Miami and the author of See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers. "In real life, that's not a recipe for great teaching," she said. "That's a recipe for a teacher whose emotional rubber band is almost always stretched to its breaking point."

Elden admits that these stories have the elements of a good Hollywood plot, but fall short as a guide for real teachers who "fall into the trap of comparing their unedited footage to other people's highlight reels." The maverick teacher "has become the only acceptable story to tell about our experiences as educators," said Elden, adding that it creates a dynamic where beginning teachers are afraid to admit they're struggling and soon are exhausted from trying to keep up with a false ideal.

"It's discouraging when the version of the story playing in real time in your classroom doesn't contain these same plot points," she said. "What I needed most [that first year] was to hear from someone who kept teaching in spite of the low points and became a successful teacher over time."

Loyola University's Royal agrees, noting that in urban schools there are always veteran educators-both those who share racial identities and cultural experiences with their students and those who don't-who work hard to meet students' academic, social, and emotional needs. Yet they are "mostly overlooked or villainized" in literature and movies, she said, with an alarming effect on education policy. She pointed to the overreliance on standardized testing and the push for immediate results as a byproduct of a trope that feeds into the idea of educators as martyrs.

"This makes it difficult for education policymakers to understand that educators are whole people with whole lives, who can be developed into excellent educators over time instead of having to be excellent from day one ... Savior narratives are sexier and easier to digest." While the mythology surrounding the teaching profession is strong and pervasive, most striking may be the messages that are amplified about white teachers in predominately non-white schools-and the qualities that are necessary to educate children in urban school districts.

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The Problem With Books About Urban-Education Heroes

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The trope of the gung-ho greenhorn in the wilds of urban public education can trace its roots back to popular classics like To Sir, With Love (1967) and contemporary films like Dangerous Minds (1995). In each, a novice teacher is able to overcome and succeed where others have failed.

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One of my favorite movie scenes is in Apollo 13 when mission control has to strategize a way to get the crew home with a limited amount of resources. "Well, I suggest you gentlemen invent a way to fit a square peg into a round hole," the flight director, played by Ed Harris, says. The team dumps a pile of random ship parts on the table, and with that pile alone, they find a way to get the crew home safely.

By using only what was available and in front of them, they met their goal. There weren't any fancy gadgets, guided booklets or practice drills to get them there. They just used what already existed in a brand-new way. In doing so, they also revolutionized space travel.

What does this have to do with education? Well, as a teacher, I feel we don't often take advantage of gathering our curricular materials from the resources we have available right in front of us. Imagine if your principal came to you and said, "The only way you can develop your curriculum this year is from using the resources that surround you in this neighborhood." Would you know where to go? Would you know what is available? Would you be ready, or would you feel completely lost?

If you dig deep, there is a WEALTH of curricular materials right outside the door of your school. Have you ever looked?

As a language arts teacher, I know I'm blessed with the chance to be creative with my text choices and still teach the skills students need to learn. However, even with the freedom to be creative, how often have I pulled something from the typical literary canon? How often have I pulled online news articles to cover nonfiction comprehension? Pretty darn often, at least in my first few years. I really didn't trust myself to develop material from scratch yet.

But as I grew in my confidence, I realized that students most wanted to talk about what was going on directly around them. Why wasn't I tapping that source?

This past year, I taught a speech class. While we did talk about current events going on all over the world, each week's speech topic was narrowed down to a local community context. When we talked about poverty, students discussed the closings of the Double 8 grocery stores in the low-income areas of Indianapolis. When we talked about the criminal justice system, students spoke about their experiences or their friends' experiences with law enforcement in the city. When we talked about the housing collapse, we took a close look at the areas of the city that were most affected. I had a student who, on the first day of class, tried to sleep all period. By the end of the first week, she was eager to participate because she had an aunt who had bought a cheaply built house before the housing collapse. It was so poorly built she remembered the front door falling right off when she'd made a visit.

It was culturally relevant pedagogy, and it was EASY to implement. My students were more engaged in the material, and once they realized their ideas could mean something, they were also more motivated to become active citizens.

Now, I know some skeptics reading this will say,"Well, what about mathematics? Or science? How can you possibly pull all of the curricular materials for those courses from the surrounding neighborhood?"Time to put a square peg in a round hole. Think about it. Numbers are everywhere. Instead of having students learn only the skills needed to pass the state test, make the numbers stand for something. They'll still learn the skills, but they will care. Look at the demographics of the neighborhood and calculate the changes by examining census data over the decades. Collect soil and water samples and find out how much lead remains in the ground.

It's culturally relevant, it's focused on social justice, and it's still a way to teach students the skills to get past those exam seasons. What is there to lose?

Time. Yes, time is the most valuable resource to a teacher. It will take time to build up a curriculum from scratch based on the unique neighborhood in which your school resides. But wouldn't it be fun to try? Don't you secretly want to feel like that team in mission control, putting pieces together you'd never thought to put together before and coming up with something amazing?

It's easy to lose the magic of teaching when we're so bogged down with everything else that comes with the job. But I encourage you to start small and build up. Challenge yourself to do ONE unit with only curricular materials from the surrounding space you're in. Once you see how the students respond to it, you might be hooked. It's there in your line of sight; the gold for your future lesson could be in your own backyard. Go out and get it.

Hannon is a life coach and teacher at The Excel Center University Heights in Indianapolis, Indiana, and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in urban education at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

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One of my favorite movie scenes is in Apollo 13 when mission control has to strategize a way to get the crew home with a limited amount of resources. "Well, I suggest you gentlemen invent a way to fit a square peg into a round hole," the flight director, played by Ed Harris, says.

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-Most corps members are considered “nontraditional” teachers, since they haven't completed a traditional course of study in education before starting in the classroom
-In order to earn a temporary teaching license, you will need to pass state exams and will likely be required to complete education coursework while you’re teaching
-The process for becoming certified typically takes one to two years and begins as soon as you accept your offer to join the corps

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Licensing & Employment | Teach For America

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Learn more about earning your teaching license and getting hired at a school.

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When a student does not learn, it doesn’t mean something is wrong with the student, DI disciples insist.

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Did you hear the one about a curriculum with fifty years of research that actually demonstrates its effectiveness? There's a new meta-analysis in the peer-reviewed journal the Review of Educational Research that looks at over five hundred articles, dissertations, and research studies and documents a half-century of "strong positive results" for a curriculum regardless of school, setting, grade, student poverty status, race, and ethnicity, and across subjects and grades.

Ready for the punchline? That curriculum is called "Direct Instruction. "

Hey, wait. Where's everybody going? I'm telling you, Direct Instruction is the Rodney Dangerfield of education. It gets no respect.

I know what you're thinking. "Direct Instruction? DISTAR, Corrective Reading and Reading Mastery? Basal programs? Scripted curriculum? That stuff's been around since the Earth cooled. It's not just old school, it's the oldest school. Who cares about 'DI' when there's so much cool, cutting edge, and disruptive stuff going on education? This is the age of ed tech, personalized learning, and competency-based progressions. The future is here and it's OER, social media integration, virtual reality, and makerspaces. Direct instruction!? You gotta be kidding me. See you at SXSW EDU!"

Hold on and look again. The central assumption of DI is that every child can learn and any teacher can succeed with an effective curriculum and solid instructional delivery techniques. When a student does not learn, it doesn't mean something is wrong with the student, DI disciples insist. It means something is wrong with the instruction. "Thus, the theory underlying DI lies in opposition to developmental approaches, constructivism, and theories of learning styles," write Jean Stockard and Timothy W. Wood of the University of Oregon, lead authors of the new meta-analysis, "which assume that students' ability to learn depends on their developmental stage, their ability to construct or derive understandings, or their own unique approach to learning,"

Ah... there's your trouble, DI devotees.

Wait. There's more. Direct Instruction is mastery-based and systematic. "If you fail to bring students to mastery in lessons 1-60, they're going to be in trouble on lesson 70," says education professor Marcy Stein of the University of Washington Tacoma. That precision and pacing-the instructional design work-is what hardcore fans love and even fetishize about DI. But those enthusiasts are outliers in education, for Direct Instruction, however effective, goes against the grain of generations of teachers trained and flattered into the certain belief that they alone know what's best for their students. The curriculum will never be written-holds the conventional wisdom-that can override a teacher's judgment about what every child needs. Fifty years of research? As another comedian, Richard Pryor, might have asked, "Who you gonna believe? Me? Or your lying meta-analysis?"

For a significant subset of teachers (actually a very large subset), the mere thought of a set curriculum imposes an intolerable burden on their autonomy and creativity. Yes, DI lessons are scripted, specifying "the exact wording and the examples the teacher is to present for each exercise in the program, which ensures that the program will communicate one and only one possible interpretation of the skill being taught," according to the National Institute for Direct Instruction (NIFDI), an advocacy organization based in Oregon. This, as much as anything, probably explains how DI can be both highly effective and the perpetual wallflower at the curriculum dance hall.

Direct Instruction advocates are "not naïve enough to think that to be successful all teachers need to do is read the DI script," Stein insists. It's not "teacher-proof" as many critics state. Proper implementation, especially for struggling students, involves not only delivering the curriculum well but constantly monitoring students and responding to their confusion in a timely and effective manner. "Teachers often report that teaching this scripted program is much more difficult than teaching one that is less prescribed," Stein says. There's often confusion between "small d" direct instruction-shorthand for any teacher-driven, explicit instruction-and the various curriculum products associated with the work of Siegfried "Zig" Engelmann across subjects, but most famously in reading. The meta-study focuses on Engelmann "big D" Direct Instruction across reading, math, spelling, language, and other academic subjects.

Direct Instruction began at the University of Illinois in the mid-1960s as a preschool program for children from deeply impoverished homes. Those who swear by it frequently invoke the results of Project Follow Through, the largest and most expensive educational research study ever mounted by the federal government, which compared the outcomes of over twenty different educational interventions in high-poverty communities over a multiyear period. "External evaluators gathered and analyzed outcome data using a variety of comparison groups and analysis techniques," Stockard and Wood note. "The final results indicated that DI was the only intervention that had significantly positive impacts on all of the outcome measures." Their new meta-analysis brings the DI story up to the present, but the meta- narrative hasn't changed.

Hey, can you hear me? Is this thing on?!

Rote or scripted, sequenced or not, loved or hated, shouldn't half a century and hundreds of studies be enough to earn DI a little respect if education is so evidence-based? "We give lip service to evidence," explains Doug Carnine, Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon and a NIFDI board member. "We say 'evidence-based' because we have to fit with the new cultural norm, but it's not a core value. It's tradition and ideology that prevails in education."

Happily, there's a burgeoning appreciation for the role of curriculum in improving teacher effectiveness and students outcomes, and increased sophistication around curriculum adoptions. But Carnine's point is sound. There's a long road ahead before education at large is a truly evidence-based field.

Stockard and Wood and their co-authors conclude that "The findings of this meta-analysis reinforce the conclusions of earlier meta-analyses and reviews of the literature regarding DI. Yet, despite the very large body of research supporting its effectiveness, DI has not been widely embraced or implemented."

True that. Everybody hates Direct Instruction. All it does is work.

And that's no joke.

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Direct Instruction: The Rodney Dangerfield of curriculum

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Edited by Marge Scherer and the Educational Leadership Staff

by Shobana Musti-Rao and Gwendolyn Cartledge

How should teachers meaningfully respond to students who start school lacking foundational skills? With early, explicit, and culturally sensitive teaching of reading basics.

Akeem, a 6-year-old African American student, sat in a time-out in his kindergarten classroom while the rest of his classmates listened to the teacher read a book aloud. Moments before, as the class engaged in its daily ritual to reinforce basic literacy skills, Akeem had balked. He refused to say the names and sounds of letters and, instead, started a fight with the student sitting next to him.

Time-out during reading group was nothing new to Akeem or several of his classmates-and is a scenario familiar to many other urban students who read below grade level. Frustrated with their repeated failure, they act out. Yet, sadly, the kind of classroom management used in Akeem's classroom-all too common in urban schools-separates low-performing students from the literacy instruction they need. What kind of instruction and classroom strategies do students like Akeem need to avoid the vicious cycle of repeated failure?

An Acute Problem

Reading difficulty is particularly acute in schools serving students from minority and economically disadvantaged households. Learners from low-income families or minority backgrounds are less likely to speak standard English (Talbert-Johnson, 2004), and many enter kindergarten without the preliteracy experiences and oral language skills needed for early classroom learning (National Center for Education Statistics, 2001). More than 50 percent of urban learners are substantially deficient in reading; for urban African American and Hispanic learners, the rates approach 70 percent (Bursuck & Damer, 2007).

The importance of identifying urban learners who are at risk for reading problems early cannot be overstated. Reading is a survival skill, and the failure to read during the elementary school years reduces a person's chances of success in school and life.

Educators often emphasize creating "literacy-rich" environments in which children learn to read as a result of being exposed to and enjoying the written word. The problem for underperforming readers is that these indirect approaches are predicated on a set of readiness skills that most of these students lack.

We agree with Bursuck and Damer (2007) that specialized interventions should begin early and should include direct instruction in prereading skills. To prevent long-term reading failure among students who come to school already behind in basic skills and experiences, teachers should include these three characteristics in their classroom design: (1) early identification of children at risk of reading failure; (2) explicit, intensive, and systematic instruction on core prereading and reading skills; and (3) continued support beyond initial instruction. In our research, we have seen that teachers who center their literacy teaching on these three elements bring about successful reading experiences for struggling urban children.

Strategies for Urban Readers

We have found that the following strategies enable teachers to intervene early in ways that reach urban students with reading problems: balanced reading instruction; early identification of at-risk learners; supplemental instruction through 2nd grade; active student responding; small-group instruction; regular monitoring of reading achievement; peer-mediated activities; positive, nonexclusionary classroom management practices; and parental involvement. All these strategies can, and should, be applied in culturally responsive ways. Some would argue that these are simply examples of good teaching. We contend that culturally responsive instruction is good teaching, but these strategies are too often absent from the classrooms of culturally and linguistically diverse urban learners who need them most.

Provide Balanced Reading Instruction

In observing teachers and urban learners, we have formed some opinions about what makes good reading instruction for most urban students. The debate over the right way to teach reading has been the source of intense battles: Proponents of phonics-centered programs emphasize the importance of explicit, systematic instruction in learning to read, whereas whole-language proponents believe that reading is a context-driven process. We agree with findings from the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) that teachers should adopt a "balanced" reading approach, with instruction in phonemic awareness, alphabetic understanding, and automaticity with the code forming the framework of beginning reading instruction.

Good reading instruction is explicit, intensive, and systematic. Such instruction is beneficial for all learners, but it is nonnegotiable for students at risk for reading failure. By explicit instruction we mean teaching specific reading skills that help students acquire the knowledge to decode print-skills that low-income urban learners don't always acquire through incidental learning. Intensive instruction gives students more learning opportunities through increased repetition of previously learned skills. Good intensive instruction techniques, such as active student responding (Heward, 2006), are not meaningless drills that "kill" learning, but carefully planned activities that elicit responding until a student masters the skill. By systematic instruction we mean the sequencing of instruction so that each skill builds on the one previously taught. Students need to become skilled in decoding, word knowledge, oral reading, and comprehension to become proficient readers, and these skills should be taught logically and systematically.

Identify Those At Risk

To be culturally responsive-to respond compassionately-urban educators need to be keenly aware of the fact that many low-income children enter school already behind their more affluent peers. Teachers must embrace their responsibility to help students acquire a solid foundation for school success, recognizing that there is a relatively brief window of opportunity to do so. Ideally, students with risk markers for reading deficiency would be identified and provided quality interventions in preschool. Many large school systems are beginning to recognize this fact and are offering preschool programs. All teachers, however, especially primary grade teachers, should provide intensive interventions to students who clearly need them, at least through 2nd grade.

Teachers in urban elementary schools should conduct skill-specific assessments to gauge students' skill levels in phonemic awareness and letter knowledge, variables considered important in identifying the risk of reading failure. Assessment measures such as the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills (Good & Kaminski, 2002) and the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999) can screen for students who need more intensive instruction in basic literacy skills.

In our studies (Musti-Rao & Cartledge, 2007), we assessed students in an urban early elementary classroom for reading risk markers. We found that a sizable part of the class had risk markers. We provided supplemental instruction over three years to students who showed reading risks in kindergarten, using the Early Reading Intervention program, a scripted curriculum that gives intensive, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness (Simmons & Kame'enui, 2003). When we assessed students at the end of the second year of the study, 40 percent of students who had been identified as at-risk readers (and received supplemental help) were now reading at an age-appropriate level; students who received this intervention in other years of our study showed similar gains. Whereas 28 percent of readers who did not receive supplemental help had regressed in reading skills by the end of the school year, only 7 percent of the early-identified at-risk readers had regressed.

Provide Supplemental Instruction

Clearly, early identification must be accompanied by supplemental instruction if students at risk for reading failure are to succeed. Evidence-based, supplementary reading programs that emphasize phonemic awareness and alphabetic principles must be part of every urban school reading curriculum from kindergarten through 2nd grade. School systems would be wise to invest in research-validated commercial curriculums. An emphasis on supplemental basic instruction should not rule out teaching with good literature and teaching for comprehension and higher-order thinking skills. Rather, through intensive basic instruction, struggling readers will develop the underlying skills that enable them to perform at these higher levels.

Supporting urban learners also requires that teachers adopt culturally responsive curriculums that go beyond describing superficial differences among cultures (Garcia & Ortiz, 2006). Teachers need to connect instruction as much as possible with each student's culture, ethnicity, and personal experience. One highly recommended way to do so in reading programs is through multicultural literature. Students should read many books that reflect their own culture as well as others' cultures. Urban learners who are immersed in literature that explicitly connects to the experiences of urban and ethnic communities display greater interest in reading and higher achievement.

Encourage Active Student Responding

Research shows a positive relationship between students' active engagement with learning tasks and their academic achievement. Active student response refers to any observable response students make during a lesson. A wide variety of instructional practices-for example, having students orally produce letter sounds after a teacher has modeled those sounds-can qualify as rich in active student responding. If designed well, active student responding can also be culturally responsive. A. Wade Boykin asserts that activities that incorporate movement and what he calls verve (the tendency to engage in more than one action simultaneously) create particularly effective learning environments for African American students (Boykin, Tyler, Watkins-Lewis, & Kizzie, 2006). Lambert, Cartledge, Lo, and Heward (2006) found high levels of academic responding and lower levels of disruptive behavior in urban learners when students held up response cards to display their answers. Peer tutoring is another focused teaching activity that is high in student response. Choral responding activities can be especially effective in learning letters, sounds, words, and reading connected text.

Teach Within Small Groups

Even with a strong core curriculum, some urban readers will not respond to whole-group instruction and will need additional reading instruction. By teaching students within small groups, educators can provide instruction differentiated according to students' abilities. Teachers should group urban students in their classes by their level of skill in reading or prereading tasks. Instruction in small groups-in addition to regular classroom instruction-provides opportunities for increased academic responding and student engagement. Teachers can vary the intensity of support depending on which reading skills-if any-need strengthening. Such specialized instruction should be reserved for students with reading deficits.

We recommend that schools prepare teacher assistants to help students in small groups strengthen their reading skills. Using assistants in this capacity frees up the classroom teacher to work with other students. In our three-year study of urban elementary students (Musti-Rao & Cartledge, 2007), we had instructional assistants and graduate students teach phonemic and phonological skills to kindergarten and 1st grade students. Students received small-group instruction three to five times each week for 20 to 30 minutes for four and one-half months (or seven months in the study's third year, in which only students still reading below grade level received the instruction).

Instructional assistants participated in formal training sessions lasting between two and six hours and using training materials provided by the Early Reading Intervention program. In the sessions, we modeled lessons and coached assistants through practice lessons. The assistants delivered high-quality instruction, and students who received this small-group instruction performed significantly higher on reading assessments than students in the control group.

Monitor Student Learning

To teach effectively, we must continually monitor student learning and skill maintenance. Teachers should not only require students to respond frequently during instruction, but also make regular probes to determine how well each reader is progressing. We recommend that teachers develop schedules to assess students regularly. Low-performing students should be assessed weekly, and high-performing readers, monthly. If the teacher observes little or no progress after several weeks, he or she should change the instructional strategy.

Create Peer-Mediated Learning Environments

With one-half of urban students reading below grade level, providing individual tutoring for such students is a logistical challenge. Through peer-mediated instruction, schools can meet this challenge and also provide communal learning arrangements, which some research indicates benefit learners from culturally diverse backgrounds (Boykin, Tyler, Watkins-Lewis, Kizzie, 2006). Peer tutoring is a research-based strategy in which students are trained to deliver instruction to one another. Students can facilitate classmates' development of reading skills through practicing key activities in dyads or small groups. In such environments, students learn to be responsible not only for their own learning, but also for the learning of their peers. Peer-mediated learning activities give students more opportunities to engage with the target reading skills or materials, opportunities they may not often have at home. Moreover, peer tutoring is an enjoyable activity that helps students be more on task and less disruptive in class.

For example, a teacher might pair students to practice letter names and letter sounds for 25 minutes, three days a week. When struggling readers are provided with three layers of instruction-whole-group reading instruction, supplementary small-group reading instruction, and peer tutoring-they more quickly master the basics and move on to blending sounds and reading simple consonant-vowel-consonant words. Al-Hassan (2006) provides a step-by-step guide for implementing peer tutoring in the classroom.

Practice Nonexclusionary Classroom Management

Classroom management practices common in urban schools unintentionally separate failing urban readers from instruction they desperately need. Low-income and culturally diverse learners, especially males, disproportionately experience suspensions and expulsions from the classroom (Skiba, Michael, Nardo, & Peterson, 2002). Thus, students who need explicit reading help often end up with fewer learning opportunities; their learning and behavior problems often worsen in tandem.

Teachers need to identify motivators that will make students want to stay in the classroom and learn rather than disrupt class to avoid engaging in learning activities. Instructional activities should be active and should reflect the learner's skill level, interests, and background. For example, a low-performing student might be assigned to work with a peer or the teacher assistant using a computer program on letter-sound correspondence. As students progress and become more confident, they will participate in class more and act out less.

Help Parents Reinforce Learning

Parents are key to reinforcing children's learning. But some low-income parents or parents of English language learners do not know how to help their children learn specific academic skills. We suggest that teachers evaluate how the parents of each student are involved in their child's education. This will help teachers set realistic goals to increase parent involvement.

We should be prepared to provide parents with explicit directions on how to reinforce their children's reading development. For example, when a student is identified as needing intensive instruction, the teacher might meet with that student's parents to explain the exact skills the instructor plans to teach, how he or she will teach them, and what materials will come home for review. Teachers can show parents how to use home-based practice materials with their child and provide a log book to document the work done at home. Such collaboration sends a message to each student that parents and teachers are working together to foster learning.

Offering Learners Their Best Chance

Students like Akeem are plentiful in urban schools. Teachers can often clearly detail the reading deficiencies of these students, but they remain at a loss to identify appropriate interventions. To be culturally responsive to urban students at risk for reading failure means to provide intervention services as early as possible, target key skills that will lead students to solidly master reading basics, and provide instruction that is intense enough for learners to make genuine gains and take pride in those gains.

The classroom should be a positive place for students-and with the right reading interventions, it can be. Many students will continue to need specialized instruction beyond our best efforts in the early grades. But when resourceful teachers respond early with the kinds of strategies outlined here, we offer struggling urban readers their best chance.

References

Al-Hassan, S. (2006). Academic proficiency through peer tutoring. In G. Cartledge & Y. Lo (Eds.), Teaching urban learners: Culturally responsive strategies for developing academic and behavioral competence (pp. 63-79). Champaign, IL: Research Press.

Boykin, A. W., Tyler, K. M., Watkins-Lewis, K., & Kizzie, K. (2006). Culture in the sanctioned classroom practices of elementary school teachers serving low-income African American students. Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk, 11, 161-173.

Bursuck, W. D., & Damer, M. (2007). Reading instruction for students who are at risk or have disabilities. Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.

Garcia, S. B., & Ortiz, A. A. (2006). Preventing disproportionate representations: Culturally and linguistically responsive prereferral interventions. Teaching Exceptional Children, 38(4), 64-68.

Good, R. H., & Kaminski, R. A. (Eds.). (2002). Dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills (6th ed.). Eugene, OR: Institute for Development of Educational Achievement.

Heward, W. L. (2006). Exceptional children: An introduction to special education (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Lambert, M. C., Cartledge, G., Lo, Y., & Heward, W. L. (2006). Effects of response cards on disruptive behavior and academic responding during math lessons by fourth-grade students in an urban school. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 8, 88-99.

Musti-Rao, S., & Cartledge, G. (2007). Effects of a supplemental early reading intervention with at-risk urban learners. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2001). The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Washington, DC: Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Available: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Simmons, D. C., & Kame'enui, E. J. (2003). Scott Foresman Early Reading Intervention. Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman.

Skiba, R. J., Michael, R. S., Nardo, A. C., & Peterson, R. (2002). The color of discipline: Sources of racial and gender disproportionality in school punishment. The Urban Review, 34(4), 317-342.

Talbert-Johnson, C. (2004). Structural inequities and the achievement gap in urban schools. Education and Urban Society, 37(1), 22-36.

Wagner, R. K., Torgesen, J. K., & Rashotte, C. A. (1999). CTOPP: Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing. Austin, TX: ProEd.

Originally published in the October 2007 issue of Educational Leadership, 65(2), pp. 56-61.

Endnote

See http://dibels.uoregon.edu for more information on the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills.

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Edited by Marge Scherer and the Educational Leadership Staff by Shobana Musti-Rao and Gwendolyn Cartledge How should teachers meaningfully respond to students who start school lacking foundational skills? With early, explicit, and culturally sensitive teaching of reading basics.

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I have experienced this first hand in my school. Adopting new curriculum isn't the answer....offer more professional development opportunities please.

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Not that long ago, elementary schools were places where students could discover what they were good at, explore the subjects that appealed to them, or maybe just be content with enjoying school.

But for many elementary school teachers who joined the profession during the last decade, and especially those who work in high-poverty schools, classrooms that provide vigorous learning opportunities to all students never existed-thanks, in large part, to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

Today, more than a decade later, the law is uniformly blamed for stripping curriculum opportunities, including art, music, physical education and more, and imposing a brutal testing regime that has forced educators to focus their time and energy on preparing for tests in a narrow range of subjects: namely, English/language arts and math. For students in low-income communities, the impact has been devastating.

"Shouldn't these early grades be a time to discover, play, and explore?" asks Los Angeles art teacher Ginger Rose Fox. "We talk all the time about making our kids 'college and career ready'-even at such a young age. Let's make them 'life ready' first. But I guess that doesn't fit into our testing obsession."

Like countless educators across the U.S., Fox has witnessed the way critical subjects have been crowded out of schools or even eliminated entirely by the lethal one-two punch of deep budget cuts and the singular focus on improving reading and math. In Los Angeles alone, one-third of the 345 arts teachers were given pink slips between 2008 and 2012 and arts programs for elementary students dwindled to practically zero.

The good news is that money has begun to trickle back in-to California, at least. But slowly improving state budgets can only go so far. Breaking the nation's fever over high stakes testing is a steeper challenge.

Across the nation, the testing obsession has nudged aside visual arts, music, physical education, social studies, and science, not to mention world languages, financial literacy, and that old standby, penmanship. Our schools, once vigorous and dynamic centers for learning, have been reduced to mere test prep factories, where teachers and students act out a script written by someone who has never visited their classroom and where "achievement" means nothing more than scoring well on a bubble test.

"NCLB has corrupted what it means to teach and what it means to learn," explains NEA President Lily Eskelsen García. "Teachers have to teach in secret and hope they don't get into trouble for teaching to the Whole Child instead of teaching to the test."

In July, NEA launched a national campaign to bring an end to the testing obsession around the country, and to move real student-centered learning back to the forefront of public schools.

"It's our job to bring back the arts and Social Studies and world languages and whatever it is our students need to leave behind the corrupting, unconscionable testing culture of blame and punish by test scores and move forward with an education that opens their minds to the infinite possibilities of their lives," García says.
The One-Size-Fits-All Agenda
In a 2011 national survey, two-thirds of teachers said many academic subjects had been crowded out by an increased focus on math and language arts. About half said art and music were being marginalized, while 40 percent said the same for foreign languages; 36 percent for social studies; and 27 percent for science. The results were particularly striking at the elementary level, where 81 percent of teachers reported that extra time devoted to math or language arts meant less time for other subjects. Over 60 percent of middle school teachers and 54 percent of high school teachers reported the same in their schools.

The culprit? More than 90 percent of teachers blamed state tests in math and language arts.

"I've seen students reduced to tears from these tests," says Tom McLaughlin, a drama teacher in Council Bluffs, Iowa. "We're robbing our students of the joy and adventure of learning."

It wasn't supposed to be this way. When NCLB was implemented more than a decade ago, its promoters trumpeted promises about raising accountability and providing adequate resources to lower income students in struggling schools. But the law, with its sweeping mandates for standardized English and math tests in grades 4-8 and its crushing consequences for schools that fail to make "adequate yearly progress," merely created a toxic culture of "teaching to the test" in order to raise test scores. It wasn't long after its passage that a narrow, scripted curriculum blanketed schools coast to coast.

High-poverty schools across the nation have been forced to narrow the curriculum much more drastically than wealthier schools-with worse consequences for low-income students. While their more affluent peers may routinely visit museums or other cultural resources, many poor urban and rural students rely on their teachers to expose them to the kind of background knowledge that is essential to subject mastery. "It has been a disaster for social justice," wrote E.D. Hirsch, a University of Virginia education professor who has championed the link between content knowledge and reading comprehension skills, in his book The Knowledge Deficit.

But the architects of these test-driven policies do think they are addressing equity-and that's frightening, says Richard Milner, a professor of education and director of urban education at the University of Pittsburgh

"We should be appalled. It's tremendously short-sighted," says Milner. "They think they are being responsive to kids who are underserved. But they're clearly not looking at the lasting damage they are inflicting."

While opposition to NCLB and testing has strengthened over the past few years, Milner has been underwhelmed by the level of outrage, believing that the devastating impact of these policies on students of color in low-income communities hasn't been given the national attention it deserves.

"It's really sad when you walk into these classrooms in these urban communities because these kids sit all day," Milner adds. "We're taking away all the things about school they could attach themselves to-physical education, arts, history. All because some adult in some office, somewhere far away, has determined that they don't need any of that in order to 'achieve.'"
Integrating Disciplines-But at What Cost?
Thanks to the burgeoning STEM movement (science, technology, engineering and math), Brian Crosby believes science education may soon be removed from the endangered curriculum list. Crosby taught science in the Washoe County School district in Nevada for more than 30 years, recently leaving the classroom to become a STEM facilitator for the state.

"I do think there was what you might call an 'oops' moment," says Crosby. "Decision-makers basically recognized that you can't educate students, especially at-risk students, by hammering reading and math all day long. At least for science, there's some good news. We're getting the curriculum 'un-narrowed' if you will."

Unfortunately teachers of other marginalized subjects can't say the same.

In January, Texas lawmakers passed a bill that, among other things, cut the graduation requirement for social studies from four courses to three. The state's social studies teachers protested, wondering aloud how they would counsel their students to choose between classes: World history or world geography? Civics or U.S. history? How do you make that choice between such valuable courses?

If it's not outright cutting of requirements, states are commonly rewriting curriculum to more easily "integrate" sidelined subjects into core areas. Physical education becomes part of math. Art becomes part of reading. But tossing a ball with numbers on it isn't really physical education, and writing about Van Gogh isn't the same as developing a passion for color or practicing brush technique.

While integrating subjects can foster collaboration between colleagues, a good thing, notes drama teacher Tom McLaughlin, he warns what might be lost in the long term. "I do think integration can be dangerous if (any one subject) becomes too consumed or morphed into reading or math. We run the risk of putting these other subjects out of business."

Social studies often falls victim to "subject integration" with reading, notes Margit McGuire, director of teacher education at Seattle University and a social studies specialist. "It doesn't foster a very sophisticated treatment of the subject matter," she says.

Lisa Steiner, a social studies teacher at George Fischer Middle School in Carmel New York, also has seen her subject receive less time, staff, and professional development opportunities compared to school districts' chief priorities: math and English arts. Still, integration can work, she says. "Social studies as a discipline can reinforce core reading and writing skills. I have a background and certification as a reading specialist, so I see the close relationship between reading and writing in the content areas and it has influenced my teaching philosophy and approach."

For many music educators, the most compelling case to be made for music in schools is its value as a stand alone subject-to bring the focus back to the benefits to students, not to their standardized tests. In April, the National Association for Music Education (NAfMe) began challenge the assumption that music is merely a "supplement" to the core curriculum, and said the organization would no longer frame the importance of music around its potential to raise test scores.

"Every time we profess that students should have access to music so that their brains become better wired to solve math equations, we provide ammunition to the camp of 'education experts' who proclaim that music is an interchangeable, or, even worse, expendable, classroom experience," explains Christopher Woodside of NAfMe's Center for Advocacy and Public Affairs.
The Inconvenient Truth: Many Students Can't 'Catch Up'
While no one discounts the very real problem of students who can't read or do basic math, defenders of the status quo often claim that glossing over science, arts and social studies is merely a fleeting elementary school experience-later to be recouped in middle and later high school.

But by then, says Rich Milner, it's probably too late.

"Without learning opportunities, these kids can't develop the competencies and skills that will help them transition from elementary school," Milner says. "Kids in urban areas are in most need of a well-rounded education and yet they are the ones who have had it stripped from their classrooms-and they don't have other avenues available to them that students in suburban communities have to at least partly supplant what is missing in schools."

Brian Crosby recalls shaking his head in disbelief when he would hear school discussions asserting that it wouldn't matter in the long run if certain subjects for at-risk elementary students were suspended so they could focus on reading and math.

"The assumption was, you could catch the students up in middle school because by then they would have a science teacher," Crosby explains. "But they couldn't just catch up. And by the time they got to high school many of these students were so far behind they were put into remedial classes. And people would wonder why kids were dropping out of school."

What kind of citizens are these practices creating? Margit McGuire believes that continually pushing aside U.S. History or Civics robs low-income students of the opportunity to tell their stories and become invested in democracy.

"We marginalize our students when we don't allow them to bring their own lived experiences into the classroom," says McGuire. "Maybe we'll get their test score up, but at what cost? We need to help young people, particularly children from impoverished backgrounds, understand or value our democracy and their role in society. That's why we have public education."

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The Testing Obsession and the Disappearing Curriculum - NEA Today

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Not that long ago, elementary schools were places where students could discover what they were good at, explore the subjects that appealed to them, or maybe just be content with enjoying school.

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When I landed my first teaching job, I was given total autonomy over my classroom with the caveat that my students perform well on the standardized state tests. With this freedom, I introduced my students to diverse protagonists who defied stereotypes, explored issues of women's rights and gender expression, and created assignments that took into account students' own cultural and community passions.

My students did perform well on the standardized tests, and of course I was glad. But beyond that, I enjoyed a feeling of purpose and integrity from aligning my philosophical beliefs with my professional practices. My goal was to make the world a better place by fostering empathy in my students and helping them learn more about the wide world around them. When given the freedom to make the curriculum in my classroom reflect my deeply held ideals, I felt purposeful and was satisfied with my job.

When I moved to a new district, I lost this autonomy and was expected to teach the same curriculum as my veteran counterparts. This curriculum had been in use for a very long time, and I found myself required to teach material that I didn't necessarily like or agree with.

Because of this limitation, my sense of fulfillment and drive plunged. I was shocked and deeply troubled by my first encounter with a scripted curriculum, and it reminded me of how I had felt during my teacher-training observation.

As an idealistic teacher-in-training, I observed an English teacher at an urban high school who was forced to adhere to a scripted curriculum generated by a textbook company. Everything was prescribed and mandated. The teacher could not adjust the speed of delivery or tailor a worksheet to the needs and interests of the students. She couldn't insert projects or readings outside of the script; any minority voices or issues of the disenfranchised that were not included in the script were simply not taught. The script even went as far as to tell the teacher exactly what to say when passing out worksheets or beginning the readings for the day. And she was told to follow the curriculum-or else.

I know I'm not the only educator dedicated to social justice who is making huge internal compromises in order to stay in the classroom. Many of us are passionate about challenging traditional narratives, exposing students to culturally relevant lessons and moving beyond worksheets and Scantron tests. And many face situations similar to mine where, in order to follow administrative mandates, they cannot teach what they believe is best for students and the world.

These compromises tear at our sense of efficacy and meaning because teaching for us is so much more than imparting skills. Many times I considered leaving, not merely because I couldn't do what I wanted, but because what I was forced to teach felt like a waste of time.

However, I didn't leave, and after careful reflection and conversations with a few students, I've discovered that curriculum makes up only a small part of what it means to be an educator for social justice.

I model empathy and compassion every day in speech and actions toward my students. In between classes, I address name-calling and slurs. When I speak with respect to students, not accusing, not degrading, not punishing, but asking, leading and inviting, I teach social justice.

In my classroom I hang Teaching Tolerance posters and photographs that memorialize the many civil rights struggles. When I make my classroom a safe space that honors those who fought for equal rights, I encourage questions about social justice.

I articulate high standards for every single student in the classroom, regardless of background, family reputation or detention record. When students know I believe in them, I support social justice.

Recently, a student from our school's newly formed Gay-Straight Alliance told me that many of the student participants in the GSA felt most safe in my classroom. "It's because you don't tolerate bullying," he told me. Because I am present with my students and work hard to make my classroom a community, no matter what I am told I have to teach or what script I'm handed, I am a teacher for social justice.

To all of those teachers who are fed up with the standardization, the mandates and the "get back in line" mentality: We do vital, needed work for the world in small actions also. Every time we forge a connection that invites a student's heart or mind to open a little wider, we advocate for social justice.
Ricket is a high school English teacher in Ohio.

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When I landed my first teaching job, I was given total autonomy over my classroom with the caveat that my students perform well on the standardized state tests. With this freedom, I introduced my students to diverse protagonists who defied stereotypes, explored issues of women's rights and gender expression, and created assignments that took into account students' own cultural and community passions.

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Making Schools Work with Hedrick Smith . School-By-School Reform . Scripted Lessons | PBS

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Eric Smith, the superintendent responsible for success in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in North Carolina, advocates the scripted strategy. He argues that in order to create change on a large scale, schools must get on the same page with their curriculum so that teachers know what is expected.

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Scripted Curriculum in Urban, Public Schools | Partners In Learning | Miami University

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Killing creativity and the breadth of knowledge we all give in our classrooms is what scripted curriculum is all about. I hate it, period.
Check out Sir Ken Robinson's video to see more about schools and their paradigms.

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Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms

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In this talk from RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools' dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.

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Michigan State University Researchers Claim That Teachers Are Tired Of Scripted Curriculum

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Michigan State University Researchers Claim That Teachers Are Tired Of Scripted Curriculum

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A number of teacher resignation letters recently went viral online. Interestingly, a study finds out that neither low payments nor retirement issues fuel this fiasco alone. Michigan State University investigates the controversial letters and discovers a bigger problem at hand.
Alyssa Hadley Dunn, an expert at Michigan State University, leads a team of researchers to examine the strange scenario of educators posting their resignations online. Apparently, teachers from all grade levels are frustrated and brokenhearted due to "scripted curriculum". It appears that they grew tired of standardized tests and retributive evaluation systems.

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A number of teacher resignation letters recently went viral online. Interestingly, a study finds out that neither low payments nor retirement issues fuel this fiasco alone. Michigan State University investigates the controversial letters and discovers a bigger problem at hand.

Alyssa Hadley Dunn, an expert at Michigan State University, leads a team of researchers to examine the strange scenario of educators posting their resignations online. Apparently, teachers from all grade levels are frustrated and brokenhearted due to "scripted curriculum". It appears that they grew tired of standardized tests and retributive evaluation systems.

According to Phys.org, in the second part of the trio study, another reason that drives the resignation madness is the hunger for the chance to be heard. Through posting their resignation letters, teachers get the attention of the public that they failed to have before. The first study entitled "With regret: The genre of teachers' public resignation letters" was published in April in the journal "Linguistics and Education". Meanwhile, the second installment will appear on "Teaching and Teacher Education" this May.

Now, the third and final research unveils that these educators want to eliminate the "blame game" and the connotation of a "bad" teacher. Well, teachers are commonly blamed for school failures. To better illustrate, soldiers get blamed for a failed mission but the truth is: they just followed orders. The third study will be published in "Teachers College Record".

Some of the people Dunn worked with include Jennifer VanDerHeide, Matthew Deroo, Scott Farver, Amy Guenther, and Lindsay Wexler. They are all from Michigan State, either as assistant professors or doctorate students. All in all, Dunn suggests that school administrators need to allow teachers to engage in the development of curriculum and educational policies.

Per Science Daily, this move will make teachers feel wanted and forget the feeling to resign. Lastly, teacher turnover costs about $2.2 billion in the US alone, on a yearly basis. It also decreases student achievement in reading and math test scores.

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Michigan State University Researchers Claim That Teachers Are Tired Of Scripted Curriculum [Video]

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What drives the sudden popularity of online teacher resignation letters lately? A number of teacher resignation letters recently went viral online. Interestingly, a study finds out that neither low payments nor retirement issues fuel this fiasco alone.

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Teachers' Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform

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Teachers' Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform

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As Rosenthal did more research, he found that expectations affect teachers' moment-to-moment interactions with the children they teach in a thousand almost invisible ways. Teachers give the students that they expect to succeed more time to answer questions, more specific feedback, and more approval: They consistently touch, nod and smile at those kids more.

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In my Morning Edition story today, I look at expectations - specifically, how teacher expectations can affect the performance of the children they teach.

The first psychologist to systematically study this was a Harvard professor named Robert Rosenthal, who in 1964 did a wonderful experiment at an elementary school south of San Francisco.

The idea was to figure out what would happen if teachers were told that certain kids in their class were destined to succeed, so Rosenthal took a normal IQ test and dressed it up as a different test.

"It was a standardized IQ test, Flanagan's Test of General Ability," he says. "But the cover we put on it, we had printed on every test booklet, said 'Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition.' "

Rosenthal told the teachers that this very special test from Harvard had the very special ability to predict which kids were about to be very special - that is, which kids were about to experience a dramatic growth in their IQ.

After the kids took the test, he then chose from every class several children totally at random. There was nothing at all to distinguish these kids from the other kids, but he told their teachers that the test predicted the kids were on the verge of an intense intellectual bloom.

As he followed the children over the next two years, Rosenthal discovered that the teachers' expectations of these kids really did affect the students. "If teachers had been led to expect greater gains in IQ, then increasingly, those kids gained more IQ," he says.

But just how do expectations influence IQ?

As Rosenthal did more research, he found that expectations affect teachers' moment-to-moment interactions with the children they teach in a thousand almost invisible ways. Teachers give the students that they expect to succeed more time to answer questions, more specific feedback, and more approval: They consistently touch, nod and smile at those kids more.

Researcher Robert Pianta offered these suggestions for teachers who want to change their behavior toward problem students:

"It's not magic, it's not mental telepathy," Rosenthal says. "It's very likely these thousands of different ways of treating people in small ways every day."

So since expectations can change the performance of kids, how do we get teachers to have the right expectations? Is it possible to change bad expectations? That was the question that brought me to the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, where I met Robert Pianta.

Pianta, dean of the Curry School, has studied teachers for years, and one of the first things he told me when we sat down together was that it is truly hard for teachers to control their expectations.

"It's really tough for anybody to police their own beliefs," he said. "But think about being in a classroom with 25 kids. The demands on their thinking are so great."

Still, people have tried. The traditional way, Pianta says, has been to sit teachers down and try to change their expectations through talking to them.

"For the most part, we've tried to convince them that the beliefs they have are wrong," he says. "And we've done most of that convincing using information."

But Pianta has a different idea of how to go about changing teachers' expectations. He says it's not effective to try to change their thoughts; the key is to train teachers in an entirely new set of behaviors.

For years, Pianta and his colleagues at the Curry School have been collecting videotapes of teachers teaching. By analyzing these videos in minute ways, they've developed a good idea of which teaching behaviors are most effective. They can also see, Pianta tells me, how teacher expectations affect both their behaviors and classroom dynamics.

Pianta gives one very specific example: the belief that boys are disruptive and need to be managed.

"Say I'm a teacher and I ask a question in class, and a boy jumps up, sort of vociferously ... 'I know the answer! I know the answer! I know the answer!' " Pianta says.

"If I believe boys are disruptive and my job is control the classroom, then I'm going to respond with, 'Johnny! You're out of line here! We need you to sit down right now.' "

This, Pianta says, will likely make the boy frustrated and emotionally disengaged. He will then be likely to escalate his behavior, which will simply confirm the teacher's beliefs about him, and the teacher and kid are stuck in an unproductive loop.

But if the teacher doesn't carry those beliefs into the classroom, then the teacher is unlikely to see that behavior as threatening.

Instead it's: " 'Johnny, tell me more about what you think is going on ... But also, I want you to sit down quietly now as you tell that to me,' " Pianta says.

"Those two responses," he says, "are dictated almost entirely by two different interpretations of the same behavior that are driven by two different sets of beliefs."

To see if teachers' beliefs would be changed by giving them a new set of teaching behaviors, Pianta and his colleagues recently did a study.

They took a group of teachers, assessed their beliefs about children, then gave a portion of them a standard pedagogy course, which included information about appropriate beliefs and expectations. Another portion got intense behavioral training, which taught them a whole new set of skills based on those appropriate beliefs and expectations.

For this training, the teachers videotaped their classes over a period of months and worked with personal coaches who watched those videos, then gave them recommendations about different behaviors to try.

After that intensive training, Pianta and his colleagues analyzed the beliefs of the teachers again. What he found was that the beliefs of the trained teachers had shifted way more than the beliefs of teachers given a standard informational course.

This is why Pianta thinks that to change beliefs, the best thing to do is change behaviors.

"It's far more powerful to work from the outside in than the inside out if you want to change expectations," he says.

In other words, if you want to change a mind, simply talking to it might not be enough.

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Teachers' Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform

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Teachers' expectations about their students' abilities affect classroom interactions in myriad ways that can impact student performance. Students expected to succeed, for example, get more time to answer questions and more specific feedback. But training aimed at changing teaching behavior can also help change expectations.

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The apple is to the teacher, what the carrot is to the rabbit.