Scripted Curricula – curricula that specify what a teacher will say, do, and write for an entire lesson – are not new; they’ve been out there in the education-sphere for decades. But in recent years, we have seen an increase in the use of these programs, exacerbated by Covid 19, highly politicized educational environments, and teacher shortages. Scripted curricula, however, are not a monolith and may only offer a short term solutions to wider problems. When strictly mandated and implemented long term, they may depress critical thinking skills, promote greater inequity for marginalized students, and undermine the development of teacher competence and efficacy.
Where it Came From
Scripted curricula have been around since the 1960s when Siegfried Engelmann, an American educator designed the Direct Instruction (DI) model of teaching. This model was rooted in the idea that if a child failed to learn, the fault lay with the instruction, so that is where Englemann focused his intervention. His idea was to give teachers scripts that would take all the guesswork out of the instruction and thereby guarantee improved learning. He posited that this ‘high quality instruction’ would lead to better learning and this was borne out by multiple studies; there were significant boosts in achievement in classrooms that used Englemann’s DI model. There are two aspects to his work, though, that are important to understand: the context in which this model was first proposed and tested, and what the model actually did.
The Importance of Context: Education’s Wild West
First the history: Englemann’s work began in the 1960s and education at that time was a different beast. The extensive standardized testing we have today didn’t exist. The Iowa Test of Basic Skills was around in the 1960s and the California Achievement Test became available in the 1970s, but these tests were closely guarded by their creators and did not allow for any kind of preparation or offer any hint as to their content. They were also – and this is key — not used to evaluate a school’s success in teaching its students. Instead, they evaluated the child’s success in grasping the content. There were also no state standards to follow. There was a kind of generally understood, but largely undefined, body of things kids should learn, but each school – sometimes each teacher – could determine what that meant in their subject area. Teachers developed their own lessons and those might have specific objectives, or they might be lessons from a textbook, or they might be completely off the cuff. Coordination between classrooms and buildings was not guaranteed or even expected. Five teachers teaching American Literature might not just use different texts, different tests, and different activities, but also hold entirely different expectations for mastery. Student success was assessed by a patchwork of measures: homework of various types and teacher-made tests that could vary widely in format, from short answer and essay questions to fill-in-the-blank and true-false questions. When Scantron readers came in, many teachers switched to multiple choice tests exclusively because they were easier to grade. At this time, the burden of learning was entirely on the student. Engelmann’s statement that “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught,”* was revolutionary; the prevailing belief was that if a student didn’t learn it was entirely their own fault and that had been an entrenched part of education for centuries. Even now, it’s discouragingly easy to find teachers who blame students for their failure to learn.
Something that is not always readily apparent in the literature is that the original DI program in the 1960s was developed for economically disadvantaged preschool children, not for K-12 education. In its original iteration, the scripts were short and tightly focused; instructional periods were 20-30 minutes long and focused exclusively on math and reading. The teacher’s instruction was carefully programmed and sequenced to ensure mastery of specified prerequisite skills so that when more advanced concepts were introduced there would be no ambiguity for students. It worked so well that Englemann and his colleagues felt it warranted further development and they expanded the model for use with other grades, still focusing on math and reading but adding language as well.
What Direct Instruction Actually Did
Englemann’s program conformed very closely to part of Robert Mager’s work on developing performance-based instructional objectives: identify what the student will know or be able to do using specific action words. This was an environment without specified objectives; just specifying the end goal gave instructors a clear target to shoot for. It also allowed the instructor to backload from the goal and build in the specific prerequisite skills needed to get there. In the 90s, we called this task analysis – what do you want them to know or be able to do and what do you need to teach so they can do it? So, the progression of the DI program looked like this:
- Identify big concepts (objectives).
- Work backward from those concepts to identify the prerequisite learning and skills students needed to be successful when those concepts were introduced at a later point.
- Backload those prerequisite skills into the curriculum.
- Develop lesson scripts for the teacher to ensure that all critical skills were explicitly taught.
Englemann’s design embodied what we now understand to be a basic principle of education: when the written curriculum is clearly specified (objectives), and the taught and tested curricula are aligned to it and to each other, student learning improves. What the DI model provided, then, was alignment of these three areas where before there had been no alignment. If a whole grade level adopted this model, then the program produced greater consistency in achievement across classrooms because teachers were teaching toward common objectives. In other words, DI provided coordination where before there was none. It must have seemed a little miraculous.
One other thing DI did that is important: it ensured that anything kids needed to know for mastery was explicitly taught. This might seem ridiculously reductive, that teachers should teach what they want kids to know. But it was (and sometimes still is) an issue in classrooms – teachers failing to teach critical skills because they assume that kids will understand something implicitly or will be able to deduce it from some activity or text. This method can work with kids who have lots of cultural capital in the form of educated parents, lots of experiences, and access to lots of books. It doesn’t work with kids from impoverished backgrounds; they rely entirely on what they are taught in school. If it isn’t taught, they can’t get it anywhere else.
It’s important to keep in mind all the work the program was doing beyond just providing a script because Englemann’s commercial imitators would focus heavily – and wrongly – on the scripted part of the lesson without fully addressing all the other pieces that created the alignment between the written, taught, and tested curricula.
__________________
*This quote has frequently been attributed to Madeline Hunter, who pioneered a lesson structure for effective instruction (Objective, Anticipatory Set, Input, Modeling, Checking for Understanding, Guided Practice, Independent Practice ) in 1976. She and Englemann were roughly contemporary so it’s unclear whether she was influenced by his work or arrived at the assertion independently. Her instructional model doesn’t look much like his; perhaps he influenced her thinking but not her instructional approach.