When Script meets Innovation: The impact on the acquisition of reading comprehension strategies of teacher experimentation with America’s Choice in Boston

Sarah Meacham

This study will analyze teacher decision-making around the planning of reading comprehension activities in middle school classrooms in Boston that have begun adopting the America’s Choice English Language Arts curriculum. Ethnographic research will document how classroom activities that result from these decisions relate to the socialization of reading comprehension strategies. Hence this study will produce general knowledge about the impact of instructional conditions on reading comprehension with two goals: a) to correlate discrete classroom activities with greater natural use of comprehension strategies (e.g. predicting, clarifying, and critical thinking), construal of meaning, and engagement with text, and b) to define these effective activities – their affective, grammatical, spatial and temporal structures – and their emergence and development over the school year. The routine integration of language, space, time, and artifacts will be analyzed as poetic structures that support certain orientations toward text and routes into comprehension. An important further goal of the study is to highlight the inevitable role of teacher innovation even within a scripted program and to codify the successful adaptations teachers make. Innovated activities will be compared with activities that remain closer to the America’s Choice script in the way they correlate with students’ natural use of comprehension strategies and affective engagement with text. This will provide valuable information for the district about how to make the program more situated and responsive.

About Sarah Meacham

Sarah Meacham received an AB in anthropology and a certificate in East Asian studies from Princeton University in 1993. While teaching English in Western Japan with the Princeton-in-Asia program, she filmed and edited a short documentary on individual women’s interpretations of gender relations and women’s work in Japanese society. This project inspired an interest in studying the way that people interpret and explain, and thereby partially construct, their socio-cultural positions. In 1995 Sarah began graduate work in linguistic anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her master’s research analyzed the rehabilitative impact of informal student-teacher interactions at a Los Angeles court school for juvenile offenders. A paper based on this work won the student essay prize of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology in 2000. Her doctoral research focused on the role of public high school English lessons in the construction of class and cultural-national identity in Japan and she received her doctorate in 2004. From 2005-2007 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education working on the National Academies Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP).