I could not endorse that more strongly!! High quality lexical representations are the key to reading.

Is MyView knowledge building? More like "topical whiplash." Also, "the 3rd through 5th grade curriculum has students read 0 whole books over 3 years." It's grim, and it gets worse from there. Read it all: substack.com/home/post/p-222…

Daniel OK-Carr has some powerful points about Savaas MyView, one of the popular basal curricula. On its Science of Reading-era revamp: "I bought the 2020 student textbook for my grade level to see the differences myself. What changed? I kid you not, the order of the worksheets. The stories, the questions, the formulaic close read prompts, and the worksheets themselves — they all are exactly the same. Either Savvas is supremely confident that their product has achieved the pinnacle of textbook glory, or they are simply supremely lazy." I wish these stories weren't so common.

“There's no way to backfill years of reading experience.“

Boo! #eduween

Day 4 of teaching with a script for the first time. Today’s script guided students through checking their rankings of 10 oil-rich countries in Southwest Asia based on different lenses and the degree to which each country has reinvested or concentrated its oil windfall. The script walked students backward through their reasoning, starting with their rankings and tracing the decisions behind them all the way back to the original evidence. In between, students connected that evidence to the transferable patterns we’ve been using to understand how countries manage resource wealth and how those decisions affect people’s lives. Two observations from today: 1. Having a script can make complex instruction more deliberate and consistent. With the sequence of questions, prompts, and anticipated student responses already planned, I didn’t have to improvise each step of the instructional process. I could focus on delivering the scaffolds clearly, anticipating where students might struggle, and helping them work through the task. Without a script, I might have covered the same material, but the sequence, clarity, and consistency would have depended more heavily on the decisions I made in the moment with limited working memory capacity. 2. Having a script can limit responsiveness if I follow it too rigidly. Without a script, I have more freedom to follow an unexpected but productive line of student thinking, adjust my explanations when necessary, or change direction based on what I notice. A script can make those decisions easier by anticipating common responses, but it can also tempt me to stick to the plan when a student’s thinking calls for something different. The challenge is to use the script as a resource rather than a constraint. Four days into the experiment, I’m experiencing the potential value of having the instructional language and sequence prepared in advance. The question is how to capture those benefits without losing the responsiveness that effective teaching requires. TGIalmostF.

Kristen McQuillan argues that "differentiation"—giving struggling students easier texts—backfires, trapping them in permanently lower-level work instead of catching them up. She recommends "teaching to the top": give all students the same challenging material, but add temporary supports like vocabulary help or read-alouds. Unlike differentiation, these scaffolds should fade away as students improve. kristenmcquillan.substack.co…

This is absolute fear mongering. Little does Zillenial know that I already work with poorly written curriculum that routinely assumes background knowledge students don’t have, and I extensively modify it. I see no reason why I couldn’t do the same with a script. At least it gives me a starting point, much like the textbook does. Ultimately, the teacher is the curriculum, not the textbook or the script. If you’re using everything as is, you’re not doing your job.

Impossible! I am reliably assured that “off the shelf” curriculum doesn’t work and robs teachers of their autonomy.

Day 5 of teaching with a script for the first time. Today’s script was my first attempt at using a traditional Engelmann-style Direct Instruction lesson. The structure followed a familiar DI progression: teacher modeling, guided practice with choral responses, individual turns, immediate feedback and error correction, increasingly challenging examples requiring discrimination, and a final check for independent application. I used it to introduce students to the geographic concepts of site and situation as part of our primate city case study on Istanbul. The script moved students through a carefully sequenced progression. We started by establishing the definitions of site and situation, then practiced identifying examples of each concept separately before moving to mixed examples that required students to distinguish between the two. Students eventually applied those distinctions to the geographic features of Istanbul and considered why its location made it valuable to three successive empires. Two observations from today: 1. An Engelmann-style script can make the sequence of instruction and practice much more deliberate. The script broke the learning into small steps, with each task building on the previous one. Teacher modeling, choral responses, individual turns, checks for understanding, and correction procedures were all planned in advance. I didn’t have to decide what question to ask next or how to respond when a student made an error. I could focus on delivering each step clearly and monitoring whether students were making the distinctions I wanted them to make. I especially appreciated how the script moved students from isolated examples to mixed examples, where they had to actually discriminate between site and situation rather than rely on a predictable sequence. 2. The precision of the script can make instruction feel mechanical. The repeated response routines and tightly controlled sequence serve a purpose, particularly when introducing new concepts and building accurate discrimination. But they can also leave less room for spontaneous discussion, student questions, and following an unexpected but productive line of thinking. I don’t want the efficiency of the script to come at the expense of opportunities for students to explain their reasoning, make connections, or explore ideas beyond the planned sequence. The challenge is knowing when to stay with the script and when to step outside it. As this lovely little experiment comes to an end, I view scripts less as something to teach from word for word and more as a way to think through the instructional decisions I want to make before students walk into the room. I expect to keep using them, particularly for modeling, think-alouds, introducing new concepts, and lessons that require carefully sequenced practice. I also want to get better at recognizing which parts of a lesson benefit from that level of preparation and which parts require me to be more responsive to students in the moment. My goal never has been and never will be to script every lesson. It’s to use scripting where it can make my instruction clearer, more deliberate, and more effective while preserving the professional judgment and flexibility that teaching requires. A more in-depth Substack piece is in the works. Until then, thanks for following along.

Text from an adult GED student after another class on the Word Mapping Project. (Also from this same student, during class: “This guy is breaking our brains, man!”) @smorrisey

"Gaining a broad knowledge of words, and therefore also a knowledge of the things to which words refer, must be among the most practical and significant educational goals in our time." -E. D. Hirsch 1996

"As this lovely little experiment comes to an end, I view scripts less as something to teach from word for word and more as a way to think through the instructional decisions I want to make before students walk into the room." I'm looking forward to the longer version of this post.

Sentence expansion is one of my new favorite additions to the Word Mapping Project. Check out these gems from class today! Oh, in case you are wondering, my kids are striving to be the best math students on campus. This one received a cheer when it was shared in class today!

Dozens of research papers showing AI improves education turns out to be bullshit hechingerreport.org/proof-po… via @jillbarshay

Important and devastating report on the SAT from Johns Hopkins and @TACollege. Among the findings: The average length of a reading passage on the SAT has decreased from 340 to 97 words since the 1980s. Step number one for restoring meritocracy & rigor to the college admissions process is a national board to determine content and standards for the primary test of admissions. This is how England does it. thomasaquinas.edu/news/tac-s…

Materials designed from an inquiry pedagogy are by definition designed badly. People can say "we need a mix" but not when it comes to curriculum design. When you design a materials you need to do things in the right order and that is what an explicit approach does.

*NEW POST* Is Understanding Just "Remembering in Disguise”? Revisiting @DTWillingham's aporism in light of a new paper by John Sweller and colleagues.