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

Last school year, Keshet piloted a new curriculum, TeachTown, that was met with rave reviews from teachers and parents. It was fortuitous that the curriculum is strategically web-based, which made transitioning to online learning easier for our students. For the 2020-21 academic year, we are expanding the use of TeachTown to all grade levels.

TeachTown’s mission is to improve the academic, behavioral, and adaptive functioning of students with disabilities. This aligns well with Keshet's commitment to providing standard-based curriculum for optimal growth and opportunities to generalize skills. TeachTown is web-based and 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.

TeachTown is built for educators 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.