Throughout the course of my first two years of teaching, I have found myself often times struggling to keep up with the high demands of standardized testing while still finding time to learn about and juggle the incorporation of many types of curriculum instructions. Between the use of reading programs, technology to further aid in instruction, and timed reading materials, it can often become a task to try to coerce these items together. If a teacher becomes an ELD teacher, they get the joy of an extra burden via the use of a second Basal Reading Program designed specifically for English Learners as an added bonus to the already mentioned tools being used. While each of these instruction tools are of great benefit to our students and provide quality feedback regarding how each student is progressing in their quest to succeed on standardized tests, much of the beneficial tools in each program are being left out and essentially never touched as things begin to be picked and pulled from each to cater to the overall success of the students. If success is accomplished in the students through the use of all these tools, then excellent. However, in the economically challenging time period we are currently facing, it is difficult to understand why such major programs are continually being made and purchased. Districts continue purchasing materials such as Harcourt (A basal reading program), Acuity (trimester test to help predict students’ scores on AIMS, and even has practice questions online that stem from each individual standard), D.I.B.E.L.S. (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills- timed reading passages), and Moving Into English (Harcourt’s EL basal reading program), but no one seems to be asking whether or not there is a curriculum that might potentially be able to incorporate the most highly used aspects of each of these packaged materials so as to not only get the most “bang for buck”, but also to alleviate the pressure teachers face regarding their attempt to pick and pull from each material. Thus far from my personal experience, I have found the most useful items in Harcourt seem to be daily oral language, focus skills such as compare and contrast, fact or opinion and others, stories that integrate both vocabulary and spelling, and the writing prompts. Within the online Acuity software, the most beneficial item is the ability to see specifically what each student missed and, from there creating worksheets for them to practice that specific missed skill. In DIBELS, of course the most frequently and highly touted material utilized is the one minute timed reading passage which determines how many words per minute a student can read as well as how much of the story they can recall. Last but not least, Moving Into English’s most effective aspects are the same as Harcourt’s. I believe there should be a better way to incorporate these most important aspects together into one incredibly resourceful curriculum that will not only excel students, but make teacher’s lives much less stressful.
(I feel I recall reading somewhere either on Vista or here where the Final Project could be an extended version of the critical analysis, so I have plans to incorporate connections between the relationships aspect from Module #2 into the Final)
