Article by Corrine Perrine, Assistant Director of Curriculum and Instruction at Keshet.

Keshet’s therapeutic day school is dedicated to providing standard-based curriculum to our students for optimal growth and opportunities to generalize skills. We use a variety of standard-based curricula to teach core skills in the areas of English/language arts, math, science and social studies. To better our instructional practices, this school year we are piloting a new curriculum, TeachTown.

TeachTown’s mission is to improve the academic, behavioral, and adaptive functioning of students with disabilities. This web-based curriculum supports instruction within several domains to help develop well-rounded students. Keshet is implementing TeachTown Basics, Elementary and Middle School Social Skills, and Transition to Adulthood.

TeachTown Basics is a blend of computer-delivered and teacher-led Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) academic instructional activities. Basics begins with an assessment of the student’s skills and creates a sequential education plan to address curriculum goals as well as IEP goals.

Social Skills is a comprehensive, character-based, video-modeling curriculum. The relatable characters in Social Skills help teach and build our students’ social skills awareness in a variety of settings, including school, home, sports, playground, shopping, parties, phone usage and friendships.

Transition to Adulthood is a comprehensive curriculum designed to teach students with disabilities in secondary and post-secondary programs critical skills to increase independence, community access and employability.

What made us very interested in TeachTown is the ability to individualize student programming. The web-based program has a built-in monitoring system that assesses the student, creates an educational plan and adjusts the curriculum based on student successes. The student profile can be individualized by time on program, reinforcements, visual and auditory supports, rewards (games), and difficulty. Additionally, the student’s hard work and progress is collected in an easy-to-read format to help the teachers make data-based decisions about instruction.

We are excited about the educationally opportunities offered through this program.