Attention Scripted Curriculum Creators: John Dewey Would Hate You

You teach long enough and you eventually figure out that educational best practices are cyclical.

What’s hot this year might not be next. But in three more, it’ll come back.

I’ve taught at a school where the principal strongly urged teachers to make the students do more work on their computers via online modules like IXL Learning and Lexia, two software platforms and educational programs used in many elementary schools to help pupils develop reading and learning skills. This cramped my style as I’m big on reading novels, answering text-based questions and completing writing prompts in one or two paragraphs.

A couple of years later, that same principal demanded teachers keep the students off the computers and make them do more reading and writing, pencil to paper. By 2030, I guarantee this principal will be pushing for more work on computers.

At the school I’m at now, the big network and administration push last year was student-to-student discourse. It goes by different names at different schools. Some call it I Talk, You Talk, We Talk: First the teacher instructs, the kids then turn and talk and we all finally get together for a group discussion. This year, the higher ups connected with my school are pushing for more direct teacher instruction.

This is funny. When I first started teaching in America in 2010 in the South Bronx, after multiple observations, administrators told me verbatim and in New Yorkers’ inimitable, straight-forward style, “Lance, you talk to me. Shut up. Instruct less. Let the kids figure it out.”

I’m sure this will come back in vogue at my school in no time.

Unfortunately, what has not gone its merry way, and appears here to stay, is scripted curriculum.

Across the country in urban schools, teachers, specifically those in reading and math, are expected to follow a scripted curriculum. I wrote a lit review on this topic for one of my grad-school classes in 2020. What I found was that these scripts are used mostly in districts that have trouble retaining qualified and experienced teachers i.e. schools in high-poverty neighborhoods.

Often, these schools are forced to employ teachers who have limited/no experience designing lesson plans and units. Many of the teachers in these schools come from fast-track teacher education programs, such as Teach for America. Because of these teachers’ inexperience, narrowed and scripted lessons are used to offset their inability to make appropriate, responsive and rational curriculum decisions.

The idea is that if teachers are underprepared, narrowed and scripted curriculum will help them know what and how to teach and when. Urban schools are often labeled “low-performing” and consequently are more likely to be directed to use narrowed and scripted curriculum in the name of raising students’ test scores.

Skyline is the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) scripted curriculum program and digital curriculum platform for grades PreK-12. Introduced in 2021, Skyline provides teachers with lesson plans, pacing guides, assessments and instructional resources.

And I, like every veteran CPS teacher I know, hate it.

It is dense, not user-friendly and it does not meet the interests and needs of students from diverse cultural and academic backgrounds, which is who you’ll find in droves in every classroom I’ve ever taught in. But the drawback of scripted curriculum that most offends me is that it limits teacher autonomy.

You know what creators of scripted curriculum and lessons – and the school districts that insist teachers use them – are telling educators? “Here, you don’t know how to do your job. Let us do it for you.”

It’s offensive. But I’ve grown used to the insult. Everywhere I’ve taught in this country forced scripted curriculum on teachers. In the South Bronx, we used EngageNY. Even in the remote Alaskan Bush village I taught in, we used scripted curriculum. I wrote about it in chapter 5 of my new book. Here’s an excerpt:

“It didn’t take me long to go rogue in Alaska, just three weeks into the school year. For self-preservation’s sake. This is what teachers sometimes do in this age of scripted lessons.

I’ve taught at two schools in the lower 48 where I was forced to repeat words written for me. I’m not sure the people who create these lessons, most often former teachers with master’s and Ph.D.’s, understand how incredibly insulting the notion is, that teachers, even those who have taught for at least 10 years, would be better served if someone told them what to teach and what to say to their students. Wow, does that make a lot of assumptions. You’re assuming that I can’t possibly know how to do my job. It also assumes, with the lessons being so inflexible and uniform, that all of the students in class read at grade level and have the same prior knowledge (or any prior knowledge), which all teachers know not to be true.

You keep following the script, the more students become disenchanted, because they are either bored with the texts or unable to comprehend. And a disenchanted student is a dangerous student who tends to become more disruptive the less he understands.

Scripted lessons don’t account for this and have no solution when this problem inevitably arises.

I’m not saying that scripted lessons (and curriculum, for that matter) are completely bad ideas; in fact, I’ve talked to new teachers, who are often overwhelmed with all of the responsibilities their job entails, who say the scripts are godsends. These teachers are blank slates, whereas I’ve accumulated a reservoir of ideas and learning activities from the many teachers, administrators, students and cultures I’ve been lucky enough to come across.

I’ve also been lucky to have principals who appreciate that I’ve managed to pick up a few teacher tricks along my meandering way and would often let me veer from the script – as long as their bosses weren’t popping into classrooms doing school evaluations. The principals trusted me – to a point.

At Inuk Valley, I was supposed to follow the curriculum on Rubicon Atlas, an online entity that was alleged to have units and lesson plans at teachers’ disposal. I had been instructed by the district to use these plans for the North Slope history class. They were supposed to make my life easier, these teacher-proofed lessons. Except the site was woefully underdeveloped. When I’d click on certain lessons I thought the students might be interested in, there was no lesson, no resources, no sub links, nothing. And the ones I found with lessons, a unit on the history of Point Hope, didn’t interest my students. Why would it? It’s about the history of a village 500 miles away. I found the lessons interesting. Did you know that commercial whaling by Euro-Americans (There goes those outsiders again!) almost ruined Point Hope near the turn of the 20^th century, when it was ruled by a corrupt village chief who stole wives and killed husbands? My students? Not so much. I started seeing more phones in classes, heads sleeping on desks and requests to go to the bathroom. There were no lessons about the history of Aluktuk, which comes as no surprise to people familiar with the Inupiat. They prefer oral to written history.

I stopped going on Atlas.

John Dewey may be the most celebrated and respected educator this world has known. He’s been dead since 1952, but his progressive philosophy is still widely studied, including at my alma mater, Teachers College. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dewey argued that curriculum and teaching should be a manifestation of children’s interests instead of mandates from school administrators.

At the turn of the 20th Century, teachers at Dewey’s University of Chicago Laboratory School were allowed to exercise great autonomy in developing how and what they taught. Dewey’s philosophy, along with that of child psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget, emphasized constructivism, which allows children to construct knowledge themselves.

Message to scripted curriculum creators, enforcers and defenders: John Dewey would hate what you’re doing to education.

Stick that in your script.