Rethinking classroom strategies: The impact of scripted lessons on teacher effectiveness

7 Apr 2025

Teachers need quality curriculum material, and they also need to understand pedagogy.

Picture a Grade 4 teacher standing in front of her 36-strong class. The teacher asks the children to look at her as she holds the book Birthday Surprise. She asks some questions about the cover. Eager hands shoot up. The teacher affirms the students as they answer her questions.

She then starts to read from the book. She points to each word as she reads: “We all enjoyed the birthday party. It was the best birthday surprise ever…” The class joins in, and all read the book in chorus. The children sitting at the back of the room with me struggle to follow, but they continue to mouth the words with the rest of the class.

The teacher misses the opportunity to relate the story to the children’s lives. In a discussion with her after the lesson, she is happy with the outcome and doesn’t seem concerned that the Grade 4 students are struggling with a reader graded for emergent readers.

Many years ago, I spent almost a month with colleagues observing teachers in rural classrooms teaching foundational literacy and numeracy lessons. The schools were short of classroom furniture and there was a lack of storage space and stationery. Rationalisation and restructuring by the education department had devastated teacher numbers, and several classes had unacceptably high pupil-teacher ratios.

Despite these challenges, I observed several positive things. The teachers were at school on time and spent the required amount of time in their classrooms, most classrooms were conducive to learning, teachers displayed good chalkboard management and storytelling skills, and many used praise and affirmation.

Whole-class teaching was by far the most popular approach to classroom teaching, and the teachers used limited teaching approaches, techniques and classroom management strategies. We seldom observed activities such as investigation, group work or independent learning. The teachers did little to build on the prior knowledge and experience of children. The children did not offer anecdotal contributions of their own.

The lower-order nature of teacher questioning meant that questions of a critical, interpretive nature were largely absent. As a consequence, the students weren’t encouraged to develop independent critical thinking or reasoning skills.

The teachers observed were committed and hardworking, fully engaged in their day-to-day work. But they struggled to handle the unexpected. Peculiarly, they seemed to be “playing school”, much like young children do. They appeared busy, going through the motions, yet with limited pedagogical understanding, and this “shallow” grasp of the pedagogic enterprise was concerning.

The literature on teacher development identifies five stages in the career development of a teacher from novice to expert. In the novice the new teacher finds his or her place in the profession. Elements of the tasks that need to be performed are labelled and executed. The behaviour of the novice tends to conform to whatever context-free rules are required — they follow a recipe.

Most of the teachers in our study needed to develop a deeper understanding of how numeracy and literacy skills were cultivated.

Scripted lessons

Scripted lessons are being extensively used in South Africa in school improvement programmes such as the National Education Collaboration Trust to improve the quality of education. These lessons are structured instructional plans designed to teach academic skills involving sequential actions and isolated knowledge components. Each lesson is built on explicit, well-defined objectives that outline observable outcomes — what students should demonstrate or articulate by the lesson’s conclusion.

American academic Barbara Beatty argued in an article that this type of teaching had been going on for centuries. Much, if not most, schooling in the past was individual learning, with students memorising scripted texts and reciting them back to teachers, “with almost none of what today would be recognised as instruction with teachers explaining content to students individually or in groups”. She noted what has been called the “instructional turn” in the 17th century, when general and subject-specific guides with detailed advice for teachers on how to teach appeared.

In her article she examined four scripted instructional models: Froebelian kindergarten, Montessori, direct instruction and “success for all”, and analysed teacher autonomy, fidelity and resistance. Her central question was whether scripted lessons were effective, and she concluded with nuanced trade-offs rather than definitive answers.

Scripted models showed measurable gains in literacy and maths for disadvantaged students, particularly in structured environments. Studies noted improved test scores, particularly when fidelity was maintained.

Montessori and early Froebelian methods demonstrated effectiveness in fostering student engagement and foundational skills, but rigid adherence often clashed with diverse student needs.

Teachers who chose intensive training initially adhered to scripts, but later adapted them when demographics (such as social class) demanded flexibility. Their training made them confident to modify materials.

Beatty noted that scripts risked mechanising teaching, reducing creativity and ignoring constructivist learning principles. Critics such as Lisa Delpit and John Dewey argue that scripts treat teachers and students as “non-thinking objects”. For new teachers, scripts provide structure but may stifle growth. For example, “success for all” users felt secure with scripts but bored by repetition and they resented rigid pacing.

Historically, rigid scripts (such as Froebelian) lost their power as teachers adapted them. Montessori persists in both strict and flexible forms, suggesting scripts survive only when allowing adaptation.

Beatty observes that modern scripts such as direct instruction and success for all face sustainability challenges, and that their corporate, top-down design often clashes with teacher autonomy, leading to high teacher turnover or covert resistance.

Ending the lesson lottery

In a study published in 2022, the Grattan Institute survey of 2,243 teachers and school leaders in Australia found that only 15% of teachers had access to a common bank of high-quality curriculum materials for all their classes. It found that teachers in disadvantaged schools were only half as likely to have access to a common bank as teachers in advantaged schools.

The survey found that teachers often planned alone from scratch, searching social media to try to find lesson materials. The researchers concluded that this created Australia’s “lesson lottery”, which undermined student learning and added to the workload of overstretched teachers.

The study concluded that when teachers had access to a common bank of materials, they were four times more likely to say they were satisfied with their school’s planning approach. Teachers also saved about three hours a week because they didn’t have to source and create materials themselves.

The survey argued that great teaching required classroom instruction based on well-designed, knowledge-rich and carefully sequenced lessons that built student knowledge and skills over time. It concluded that without a whole-school approach to curriculum planning, even the hardest-working teachers would struggle to give their students the best education.

Do scripted lessons work?

Beatty noted that scripted instruction’s effectiveness was context-dependent. Although structured scripts could standardise learning and benefit disadvantaged students, they often undermined teacher autonomy and adaptability, which was critical for addressing diverse classroom needs.

She argued that if scripted learning was going to be successful, the following conditions must be considered:

Teacher training: Intensive, voluntary training (as in Montessori or Froebelian) fosters fidelity and adaptive expertise.

Balanced flexibility: Scripts that allow strategic modifications sustain teacher buy-in and effectiveness.

Ethical considerations: Scripts risk deprofessionalising teaching, but offer scaffolding for inexperienced educators.

Beatty provided no universal verdict on scripted lessons and concluded that their value lay in balancing structured support with teacher agency, ensuring scripts served as tools rather than constraints.

Scripted lessons move away from Paulo Freire’s approach to education, which emphasises the need for critical consciousness among students. The transformative process where education is a dialogical exchange rather than a simple transmission of knowledge is lost, and somehow these ideas need to be rediscovered. DM

Dr Mark Potterton is the principal of Sacred Heart Primary School and director of the Three2Six Refugee Children’s Education Project.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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