Manifesto

How scripted programs subvert vital teaching

By Pamela Cheng

The AB466 training took place in a fancy hotel. They provided 3 course luncheons, including coffee and dessert. At the front of our assigned conference room, a display of our grade level Open Court teacher’s editions, sound-spelling cards, supplemental books, kits, and CD’s reminded me of the past year’s tabbing, highlighting, and pre-reading the unwieldy materials into the late hours of the night-all the while paranoid about missing the small print in the corners and margins on each page.

Our facilitators, one stoutly organized and energetic, the other nervous yet nurturing, welcomed us to their room and reassured us that by week’s end, we would see Open Court for all it that it offered, for all that it incorporated, for all that it could do to improve our students’ academic performance.

For six hours each day over the next five days, we read, tabbed, watched, discussed, and reflected. At night we read research articles supporting the practices we were learning and wrote responses to questions about them. During the day we asked about changes our facilitators had seen in student motivation; they modeled the correct pacing. We raised concerns about differentiating for varied interests and abilities; they referred us to sections and supplemental materials we had overlooked. Fast-paced and chocked-full of information, our facilitators tag-teamed our reservations and doubts, reassuring us over and over again, “Don’t worry, it didn’t all make sense to us at first either. But as you get better at using it, you will see just how smart this program is.”

With these words, our workshop leaders planted a seed of doubt in my mind; was I getting in the way of The Program’s effectiveness? Had the 9 PhD authors embedded knowledge that was bigger and better than I was capable of recognizing? After all, I had experienced many moments of insight at the hands of our facilitators. And understanding the theories behind the various strategies compelled me to implement them more faithfully. I scrutinized the texts for elements I had left out the year before; I took notes about what I could change in order to be more faithful during the coming year.

My classroom walls became color coded, to match the sections of the program. I organized charts, laminating the posters delineated the different “weekly components.” I would try some of the practices that hadn’t made sense to me before: choral decoding of weekly word lists, vocabulary transparencies, decodable books, writing worksheets.

I gave up time from reader’s workshop, self-selected reading, peer sharing of favorite books, book clubs and my favorite read aloud stories. I would also have to choose between weekly scripted writing lessons and building up to our monthly publishing parties through writer’s workshop, peer response groups, and time to tell our stories out loud before writing. But I reviewing my notes, I remembered the facilitators’ urgings to give the program a chance to succeed by getting out of its way; so I put aside my own reservations for my students’ sake and decided to give the program an opportunity to teach me.

The year began, and although some things went well, they were fragmentary segments. Significantly, these materials supported goals I already had for my students. Other things didn’t go so well. Students asked if they could have more time reading books of their own choice-but we still had to finish our whole-class first and second read, not to mention the weekly decodable book and the corresponding worksheets in the two workbooks.

My high students, who had quickly figured out the program’s routines, were getting visibly frustrated with my slower readers. Our discussions on the shorter texts provided by the program did not develop as deeply as our sustained conversations around the longer novels I’d picked in the past; all shared reading and read-alouds were based on each unit theme rather than on my students’ interests. The drier, workbook approach to learning grammar often made lessons drag on while I was forced into a policing role: “Chris, are you with us here? What did you get for number 5?” I cringed at the sound of my own voice. My job seemed to have been reduced to keeping order and discipline enough to pave way for the textbook.

Meanwhile, something disconcerting was happening to my own motivation and inner life as a teacher. Lesson planning lost its former appeal. I had less freedom to design and adjust lessons to lure in certain kids, or to respond to what I had noticed students doing the day before. I attended fewer teacher workshops and declined participating in a professional book club that year-there was simply no class time to implement any good ideas I might get anyway. I had fewer reasons and less motivation to get to school early to adjust and fine-tune my plans for the day. The program gave detailed instructions for every minute of those two-and-a-half hours it required of each day. Despite my own opinion, I suppressed questions and doubts, in order to to give a chance to succeed those parts of the program that I did not agree with. I sped up the pace of our daily word-list reading. I made a game out of reading the decodable books as quickly as we could and counting our words per minute.

For the first time, I had students tell me that they disliked reading; they thought it was boring. My heart ached on each occasion. Should this be the nature of teaching? Would drilling students on the skills they would need for tests have any lasting effect if they couldn’t detect any value or meaning in what they were doing?

Did what I thought matter anyway?

And then one terrible day, I got to school just in time to write the schedule, morning message, and make the copies I needed. I knew the story from last year, but hadn’t reread the think-alouds for the lesson, so I read the scripted words:

“This part of the story reminds me of a time when my grandfather carved something for me.” Never mind that one grandfather had died before I was born and the other one had never carved anything. But it was too late–I’d already read it out loud, and with expression so that it sounded natural. Before I could move on, Emma smartly followed up on the connection and asked me, “What did your grandfather make for you?”

I stopped. They hadn’t scripted that part of the interaction. And I beheld the stale, lifeless form my teaching had taken. I recovered by recalling how the grandfather I had known had once sharpened a pencil for me with a knife.

The experience deflated me; I had not bothered to prepare. I had given my teaching over to the textbook blindly. I had let the publisher’s low expectations of me as a teacher turn me into an automaton by putting their words above my own understandings, above my own daily experience of the classroom. I was the one there, hearing my students’ responses and witnessing their reactions. But I had swallowed my own voice and sacrificed my students’ engagement at the textbook’s alter.

We put the prescribed curriculum on hold for a week as I read aloud my favorite books-books that I would later revisit to teach effective writing. My students chose piles of books and we worked out the rules to readers workshop so that they could read for long stretches and “get sucked into” them. When it was time to stop, they begged for more. I gave them time to talk to each other about what they had read at the end of each workshop. They recommended books to peers who seemed to like some of the same types of books that they did. With Thanksgiving approaching, we gave thanks for our favorite stories by writing thank-you cards to our favorite authors. One of the little boys who had previously told me that he didn’t like reading wrote me a thank you card. He put heart stickers all over the front and back covers. He carefully closed it with a band-aid. Inside, the small card read:

Dear Ms. Cheng,

Thank you for giving us 5 reading books, giving us time to write, and writing a letter to friends.

Love,

Jatin

Under these words, he drew a picture of himself and me, standing next to each other, each of our hands overflowing with books.

I did not abandon the language arts program. But I finally recognized the fallacy of putting a fixed curriculum above my students’ changing needs and above my own ability to perceive and respond to them. I gave myself permission to override, to revise my teaching based on my students’ growth, and to judge my teaching by my own standard of excellence as I have defined it for myself.