Reply to Lucy Calkins alarmists

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s based one fake research. What more could you need to know?

Listen to sold a story, read any of the articles, form your own opinion….

As a parent, former teacher, curriculum specialist there’s no way I would want my kids at a school that uses this approach. It’s likely a huge part of why we see so many young adults who are failure to launch kids and why we see so many kids unprepared for college and career. Kids of all kinds need direct instruction! [/quote]

https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-a-call-for-rejecting-the-newest-reading-wars/

Critics have said Sold A Story is overly pushing phonics alone. They say if you teach phonics and bring in supplementary material, Calkins, writers workshop, F&P can be great. 
[/quote]

PP.  The truth is that good teachers can rise above bad curriculums to a surprising degree...if they are allowed to use their judgment and they have administrative support and a reasonably-sized classroom of well-behaved kids to teach.  Those are a lot of preconditions.

I mentioned my kids went through this curriculum.  I have more regrets on the math curriculum side where a best practices "Singapore Math" curriculum had to be ripped out and a new one put in.  I've spent $$$$ remediating that curriculum plus pandemic effects and all the tutoring really does is assign problem sets and monitor the kid working through them.  Exactly like what they would do in school if teachers had infinite time to give personal attention to every student.[/quote]

What kind of math curriculum was put in place to replace Singapore? [/quote]

PP. The replacement of the elementary math curriculum just happened since the pandemic and my youngest was ending 5th grade at the beginning of the pandemic.   So we haven't experienced it. The curriculum that was replaced was from a national publisher and the new one is from a different national publisher.  My son says it's this for high school (so perhaps the same for K-8).:

https://www.mheducation.com/prek-12/program/microsites/MKTSP-GIP20M0.htm

Similar to the issues with Calkins, a lot of best practices lip service was given to math exploration with the previous curriculum.  So that meant exploratory group work instead of direct instruction.  It meant emphasis on manipulatives and models (coloring in those squares that help you understand place value), etc. Also, my school district doesn't have accelerated math until 6th grade unless secretly you are recognized as two years ahead of grade level.  And the teachers were supposed to differentiate instruction within the classroom in K-5 but in reality there was almost no extra enrichment for kids that completed work early.  So my kids weren't challenged and my younger son was bored a lot of the time.  I wished I knew the 2 year accelerated skill level rule for enruchment - I could have prepped him to that level.

Now that I've paid a ton for late elementary-high school 
math remediation, I'm much more in favor of direct instruction and drill and kill. I don't think explore and discover and draw models techniques work like they are supposed to.  The Calkins debacle has me concerned about the rigor of claimed educational research.  I also think Ed Tech in the classroom is mostly babysitting. [/quote]

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