All over the country, states are putting in place new legislation that guides how literacy can be taught. These laws have up-sides, like requiring robust foundational skills teaching, or screening students for reading difficulties. However, many of the laws also come with lists of approved curricular materials*. As districts select and purchase new materials, many teachers are opening shiny boxes of teachers’ guides and student readers and thinking: “Now what? I cannot possibly do every activity in this lesson plan given everything that I have to teach in a day.” Often, teachers don’t get much training on the program materials, so it’s tough to know which parts of the lesson are essential and which can be shortened or cut out.

I’ve worked with many different sets of materials, some not-so-great, and some fabulous. But all needed tweaking to meet my students’ needs. Here are a few tips for adapting lessons from any box of materials that shows up in your classroom.

1. Put text at the center. 

One of the big changes wrought by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) – and the associated state revisions of the standards – is that analyzing, learning from, and comprehending text is at the center of reading instruction. No matter which program you have, there will be some kind of text that you are reading.

Start by analyzing the text, asking yourself:

• What is the big idea of this text? (By “big idea” I mean theme, central idea, lesson… whatever you call it in your context)

• What are the barriers that my particular students will have to understanding it?

• What affordances might support my students in understanding – if I teach to them? An affordance, according to researcher Tim Shanahan (2019) “is any resource or support the text offers to readers that can help to facilitate communication or understanding.” Text features often provide affordances, but students may not know how to navigate these features without explicit teaching.

2. Plan with the end in mind

Review the standards and assessments that are attached to the lesson. Are they appropriate for the text? Does the assessment actually address the standard that is being assessed? If not, you may need to adjust.

For example, I just read a lesson plan that was meant to address both CCSS RI.4.1 (key details) and CCSS RI.4.2 (central idea). However, the assessment only asked students to identify key details. This mismatch could be addressed by simply asking the students to also supply the central idea.

3. Assess activities

Keeping in mind the barriers and affordances you found in the text, as well as the assessed standards, review the lesson’s activities and text-dependent questions. Ask yourself:

• Do the lesson activities and prompts scaffold so that students can access the big ideas of the text?

• If not, add scaffolding, making sure that it’s not so scaffolded that students’ don’t need to think deeply about text. This article has seven scaffolds that can be used with complex text.

• Do the questions and CFUs give me information about whether my students are understanding?

• If not, adjust the questions. A simple way to do this, and make sure you don’t forget the adjustment, is to write the new question on a sticky note and place it in the teacher’s guide over the original. Digital teacher’s guides often have online lesson planners where you could write these notes.

• Are there activities or questions that are extraneous to the standard?

• If so, these are the things you can skip if you’re running out of time.

4. Consider engagement.

Many core reading programs have a lot of workbook pages. And you know, the occasional workbook page is fine. However, the core tasks of literacy are reading, writing, listening, and speaking. If kids are not doing these things, then their opportunities to grow their literacy is limited. Not only that, but engagement can suffer.

Often, the tasks in a workbook or activity page can be turned into robust engagement opportunities. For example, can a question in the workbook become a think-turn-talk? Rather than choosing a main idea statement from a multiple choice question, can students construct one on their own? 

Here’s an example from the lesson I reviewed today (the one about central idea and details): The objective said that students would be able to explain Earth’s layers and how tectonic plates move. However, the assessment was a fill-in-the-blank exercise; students didn’t actually have to explain anything. This activity could be shifted in several ways to better engage students and meet the objective. Students could: write a paragraph; take part in a discussion; or create a diagram with descriptive labels.

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The work of adapting lessons from published curriculum materials can be a challenge, so this work is often best done with others. If you can gather a group of teachers and focus on lessons together, you can share the learning and the work.  Take it slow – you don’t have to change everything all at once. Over time, the process of internalizing and adjusting lessons becomes more automatic.                

*I know there’s debate out there about whether we should call these “programs” or “curriculum” or something else. My personal opinion is that language is a living thing and you can’t police what people call stuff. I’m going with materials, because it links to the discussion of “high-quality instructional materials (HQIM).” And sometimes I might use both “program” and “curriculum” when it makes sense.