Topics: Wit & Wisdom

Chicago Elementary School Making Steady ELA Gains with Wit & Wisdom

Great Minds

by Great Minds

January 21, 2025
Chicago Elementary School Making Steady ELA Gains with Wit & Wisdom

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Posted in: Aha! Blog > Wit & Wisdom Blog > Wit & Wisdom > Chicago Elementary School Making Steady ELA Gains with Wit & Wisdom

Embracing the science of reading is paying off at Armour Elementary School in Chicago. The PK–8 school in the Bridgeport neighborhood on the South Side of the city is seeing steady gains in English language arts on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness.

The school piloted Wit & Wisdom® in the spring of 2022 and fully implemented the curriculum the following year (2022–2023).  Here's a snapshot of their achievement gains: 

Screenshot 2025-01-28 at 12.52.38 PM

Katherine Cheng became principal at Armour Elementary School in Chicago in the 2017–18 school year. She said at the time the school, like many Chicago schools, used Lucy Calkins Units of Study as its curriculum. 

School Snapshot:

Enrollment: 245 students 

White: 8%  |  Black: 12%  |  Hispanic: 72%  |  Asian: 4%  | Other: 4%  

Low-Income: 83%  |  Multilingual learners: 23%   |  Special education: 14%  

“Student performance was lagging. We just weren't able to move it,” Cheng recalled. She said she and teacher leaders began to look closely at the instructional materials they were using. “We started to realize the curriculum had a lot of gaps. Our teachers had to fill in and write a lot of their own materials,” Cheng said. That led to a disjointed approach that wasn't always aligned with state standards, she added. 
  
After doing a lot of research and looking into various ELA curricula, the school decided to pilot Wit & Wisdom across grades in the spring of 2022. Cheng said she and her team liked that the curriculum was rich with literary and informational texts, topic-driven to support building background knowledge, and that reading and writing were integrated.  
  
Cheng says she particularly likes the rigor of the writing in the curriculum. “Our students have a regular opportunity to produce their thoughts and share their thinking,” she said. “The writing expectations are clear, and it's clear students will have writing instruction every day.”
  
That was challenging at first. “That was a big lift. Kids needed to develop the stamina to be able to write, organize their thinking, and express themselves,” Cheng said. 
 
But now Cheng says kids enjoy the regular writing practice embedded in the curriculum, which has helped fuel the school's literacy gains. She added that the attention the Armour team has given to ensuring struggling students get the support they need through small-group instruction and scaffolding has been essential too.  
 

Sylva Vergara, a lead teacher for kindergarten, said students are also developing strong speaking and listening skills. “Changes I see with Wit & Wisdom include more student-to-student discourse, more students engaging with question-and-answer about texts with peers, and more focused conversations,” she said. 
 
Cheng said coaching and PD provided by Great Minds to teachers and leaders at Armour has also helped fuel progress: “Ongoing coaching has supported our school leadership in building expertise on the curriculum, delivery, and implementation—not only terms of student outcomes, but the teacher actions that can be supported and enhanced to achieve the full experience intended in the curriculum.”

 

Vergara agrees. “Wit & Wisdom coaching has been great. I would suggest anyone who wants to implement this with fidelity engage in coaching to learn as much as they can,” she said. “I appreciate the opportunities I had to really sit with the curriculum and learn the modules and how the standards were taught.” 
 
At Armour, departmentalized instruction, in which teachers lead instruction in their specialized areas, has also been integral to the school’s success, allowing teachers to be experts and leaders in their instructional areas. 

Anchor ChartsAnchor charts from Ms. Vergara's kindergarten classroom show the knowledge students have gained about their five senses. (Photo Credit: Lainie Augensen).

  
Today, Amour's teachers engage in common lesson planning and shared learning goals. They can clearly articulate what their students need to be able to do to demonstrate their knowledge of concepts being taught. Teachers have a close eye on these components of their lessons, Cheng said.  
  
Looking at Armour's progress, it's a strategy that, like others the school has pursued, is clearly working. 

Armour also has tracked its cohort data from spring 2022 to spring 2024. These data highlighted in the chart below spotlight groups of students over time as they progressed up the grades. You can see each of the four student cohorts tracked made impressive gains. 
 
Cohort 1 
The 2022 Grade 3 cohort went from 13 percent meeting expectations on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness to 13 percent meeting and 4.3 percent exceeding expectations in 2023 when they were in grade 4. Most recently, 26.1 percent of students met expectations and 4.3 percent exceeded expectations on the assessment in 2024 when they were in Grade 5.

Cohort1

Cohort 2 
The 2022 Grade 4 cohort went from 23.8 percent meeting expectations on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness to 33.3 percent meeting and 4.8 percent exceeding expectations by the time they were in Grade 6.  

Cohort2

Cohort 3 
The 2022 Grade 5 cohort went from 25 percent of students meeting expectations on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness to 32.1 percent meeting and 3.6 percent exceeding expectations in Grade 6. Most recently, 46.4 percent of students met expectations and 10.7 percent exceeded expectations on the assessment in Grade 7.

Cohort3

Cohort 4 
The 2022 Grade 6 cohort went from 16.7 percent meeting expectations and 4.2 percent exceeding expectations on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness to 29.2 percent meeting and 4.2 percent exceeding expectations in Grade 7. Most recently, 53.6 percent of students met expectations and 7.1 percent exceeded expectations on the assessment in Grade 8. 

Cohort4

 

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Topics: Wit & Wisdom