Student Achievement Soars with “Unapologetically Rigorous” Curriculum

Student Achievement Soars with Great Minds^®“Unapologetically Rigorous” Curriculum

Wit & Wisdom^® Pilot School Sees Three Years of Consistent Student Gains

The Challenge

When Principal Matthew Katz joined Rufino Tamayo six years ago, the school was on the Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) closing list after three straight years on the lowest rung of the CPS rating system.

Unless Katz and his team improved Rufino Tamayo’s rating, the district would close the school. But they weren’t just focused on ratings. The team also wanted to give Rufino Tamayo students, many of whom are English learners who did not attend preschool, a meaningful, joyful, rigorous education that would prepare them to succeed beyond middle school.

School Profile

• Center City Public Charter School
• 1,387 students
• 71% Black, 23% Hispanic, 4% Two or more races
• Began Wit & Wisdom® implementation in school year 2018-2019 and Geodes® implementation in school year 2021-2022

To pursue these goals, the team started by adopting Eureka Math™ in 2015, the popular mathematics curriculum from Great Minds^®. When that proved successful, the Rufino Tamayo school leaders and teachers decided together to pilot Great Minds’ English language arts (ELA) curriculum in Grades 5–8. They liked that the curriculum, then known as Great Minds English, featured knowledge-rich, grade-level texts for all students, including English learners and striving readers.

Calling the curriculum “unapologetically rigorous,” Katz explains that a program “based in complex texts seemed ideal to get our students more of the real-world opportunities for ELA performance we were looking for.”

The Results 

Three years have passed since the pilot, Great Minds English was revised and renamed Wit & Wisdom, and the district now classifies Rufino Tamayo as a “1+ school,” the highest CPS rating. Student achievement has increased steadily and dramatically. Students now in Grade 8 have had the curriculum for all three of those years, and 50 percent of current Grade 8 students are at or above the 75th percentile in English, which for most of them is a second language. This year, the percentage of Rufino Tamayo students are achieving at historically high levels.

2017-18 Reading Growth: Grades 3-8 

 (Rufino Tomayo school had the highest percent of 3-8th graders increasing their percentile)

Though it took students a while to adjust to Wit & Wisdom’s text-focused routines—Katz remembers the “comical awkwardness of the productive silences”—they’ve grown confident in working with the texts. Students not only understand the material, they seem to love it.

During last year’s high school spring break, a group of alumni returned to Rufino Tamayo to facilitate a Socratic Seminar about a novel they studied in Grade 7.

“That’s really neat,” Katz says, “to go from a place where kids are giving each other the side-eye—like, ‘Are you going to talk? Are you going to talk?’—to having alumni come back in our doors and really actually assist in facilitating the conversation.”

Strong Leaders and Teachers

One key to Rufino Tamayo’s success is dedicated teachers. The leadership team asked for teachers’ input on curricular decisions, valuing their ideas and expertise. Katz says that one teacher who had previously taught high school was particularly focused on the question “How do I get kids ready for what they’re going to encounter when they go to the types of high schools we want them to get into?”

Katz and Assistant Principal Kim Kalivoda support teachers by providing time and space for collaboration. Building on the elements of Wit & Wisdom that support English learners, the teachers have worked together to adjust instruction to help students meet the full rigor of the curriculum’s Learning Goals and express understanding of the module texts.

In addition, the Rufino Tamayo team committed to the challenge of mastering a new and rigorous curriculum gradually, over several years. 

“[Wit & Wisdom] has gotten better for our teachers and students every year,” Katz says, reflecting on the implementation process. “As we have worked more with it, we have uncovered more of the layers and ways in which it can serve students in great depth.”

Kalivoda adds, “The proof is in the pudding when we see our eighth graders. Having a significant number of them in the top quartile for Northwest Evaluation Association reading is crazy, and that’s a high-performing group of kids. But that certainly wasn’t the case three years ago when they had the curriculum for the first time.”

Learning Design: Access to Complex Texts for All

After her first year with the curriculum, one Grade 8 student was asked how ELA instruction had changed. “Last year, we all read texts that were at our specific level,” she responded. “This year, everyone read the same thing, even when it was really hard.”

Wit & Wisdom is based on research showing that performance on complex texts is the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are ready for college and those who are not (ACT 16–17). So rather than providing lower-level texts for English learners and striving readers, the curriculum provides rich texts to all students and supports diverse learners with strategies such as explicit vocabulary instruction, art analysis, and fluency work.

Now, Katz says, students “have a chance to access books that previously would have really been out of reach for them.”

One aspect of the curriculum’s design that is instrumental to student work with complex texts is the Content Framing Questions (CFQs), a line of transferable questioning that can be applied to any text. Starting with the question “What do I notice and wonder about this text?”, the CFQs provide a process for encountering a text, establishing literal comprehension, and progressively deepening understanding. With the CFQs, students progress from reading with curiosity and attention (Wonder Stage) to organizing ideas (Organize Stage) to revealing aspects of the text’s content and craft (Reveal Stage) to distilling essential meanings (Distill Stage) to articulating what they know (Know Stage).

Additionally, through the texts, students build a deep body of knowledge about each module’s topic. Because background knowledge is key to reading comprehension, students benefit from developing expertise in a single topic. It helps them access texts above their typical independent reading levels (Adams 9–10) and fuels enthusiasm for learning.

Katz recalls an anecdote illustrating how important it is for all students to have access to complex, knowledge-building texts:

The prize for the students of the quarter is they get to pick out a book. And last year, first quarter for the seventh grade, I went to get the student: “Let's go pick out our book.” And he says, “Well, Mr. Katz, the book I want is the book we’re reading right now in class. The book I want is Code Talker.” I said, “Are you sure? You’ve already read that, and you can have any book, and Ms. OBC will always let you borrow her copy of Code Talker if you want.” And he said, "No. I want Code Talker. I want the book so I can have it and read it any time.”

And this is a book it’s really likely he would have never had any exposure to, and now his book of choice of all the books in the world is a book about World War II Navajos. And I think it just speaks to students … getting experiences. They're being pushed into experiences that are really revelatory and important for them that we wouldn’t have been able to find for them using a more traditional approach.

Kalivoda explains that the curriculum’s focus on complex texts about worthy topics “lends itself to our greater vision for academics at our school, which is not just drilling skills but connecting to a larger picture, a larger development of knowledge over time.”

While student achievement at Rufino Tamayo has increased dramatically over the past three years, the team there emphasizes that Wit & Wisdom is not a quick fix: “This is a long-term investment in your students as lifelong readers and writers.”

Works Cited

ACT. Reading Between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals about College Readiness in Reading. ACT, 2006. Accessed 29 May 2018.

Adams, Marilyn Jager. “Advancing Our Students’ Language and Literacy: The Challenge of Complex Texts.” American Educator, vol. 34, no. 4, 2011. Accessed 29 May 2018.