Wisconsin District Unites Around New Vision for ELA Instruction with Wit & Wisdom

We recently sat down with Carrie Willer, PhD, Director of Elementary Education at the Appleton Area School District (WI) to hear about the district's thoughtful approach to curriculum adoption amid their transition from balanced to structured literacy.

The district began using Wit & Wisdom® in grades 5K–5 in the 2024–2025 school year, finding positive impacts on instructional leadership, student achievement, and student engagement as Carrie explains in the interview below.

What was ELA instruction like before you adopted Wit & Wisdom?

I still can't believe where we are today because when I first transitioned into this role, we were solidly using balanced literacy. We were accumulating years of low student achievement data, and our achievement gaps were growing. Our teachers were working so hard, and they were frustrated because they were spending an enormous amount of time gathering additional resources outside of Fountas and Pinnell without a clear assessment pathway or writing continuum to guide their work. Each of our classrooms were teaching different books and each school felt like a very different learning environment. Our superintendent wanted my department to write lesson plans for our teachers to help bring their workload down and increase fidelity of the learning experience for our students, and at that point, we thought, “There's got to be more to this. Why does our data look so poor?”

So a small team of district-level administrators participated in monthly professional learning about foundational skills and early literacy, and we formed a collective vision of best practice based on how the brain learns to read. It was a game changer!  That vision became our Eight Guiding Principles for ELA instruction, which would later drive our resource adoption.

The following year, our early literacy learning cascaded down to our elementary principals, and then to teachers. I purchased Shifting the Balance for all K-5 teachers, and we read a chapter a month to learn about the instructional changes we needed to make. Then, I put together a team of teachers and principals­—with representatives from each school site—for an ELA Program Evaluation. We gathered feedback about what teachers wanted, took a closer look at our student data, and completed a K–2 literacy audit to look at instructional practices that were or were not happening in our buildings. It became very clear that we needed a strong phonics program and comprehensive ELA program in our schools.

What did the adoption process look like?

Our superintendent was able to fund a phonics field test so that any of our K–2 teachers who wanted to pilot a foundational skills program could do so. But we knew we had to expand to a universal curriculum, and by December 2023, we were all-in on finding a comprehensive resource.

At the time, the state had just adopted Wisconsin Act 20, and the Department of Public Instruction began creating a list of literacy resources that would be approved. They were well intended but couldn’t meet the timeline they established for the release of the state-approved resources, so we had to decide whether to wait or move on our own. Since we had a lot of support and started this work long before Act 20, I told our superintendent, “I don't think we can wait—I think we can do this on our own.” So we did.

We knew we wanted a knowledge-building curriculum, and it needed to be given the green light in EdReports. I also considered CURATE from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which is similar to EdReports, but provides reviews from teachers as well. Four knowledge building resources rose to the top, and all our elementary teachers were invited to try them out and vote for their top picks.

Three of the four resources were invited to present at a curriculum fair in February of 2024 and all our elementary teachers were able to vote for two. Wit & Wisdom was one of the options that got picked by a landslide along with one other resource. We then took a team to observe some districts implementing those options, and we had free digital access so that our teachers could get into the resources as well.

When we did another survey, we had a lot of teacher buy-in, and Wit & Wisdom won by quite a bit. I think because teachers understood the why from the learning we did as a district and because they had such a strong voice multiple times throughout the process—through surveys, committee work, and the curriculum fair—it really felt like teachers selected this resource. It’s been fantastic.

How did your collective vision influence the adoption of Wit & Wisdom? 

Our district vision is “Success for every child, every day,” and that applies to all our work. From there, our ELA program evaluation team and our resource adoption team came together and created Eight Guiding Principles for ELA Instruction that really helped us narrow the resource we wanted to select. When we were making our final decision, the other resource didn’t support a couple of those collective commitments the way that Wit & Wisdom did.

Our fourth commitment is for students to be immersed in complex and challenging texts at grade level and above with extra scaffolding and supports. We wanted to embrace that concept of productive struggle. The other resource we looked at didn't have authentic texts at the K–3 levels. Students were reading basals and sometimes not even accessing actual texts, so that was one big aspect that influenced our decision.

We love Wit & Wisdom for providing that frequent opportunity for students to read, discuss, and write about texts across genres, cultures, and time periods. It was a growing pain for us, but it’s pushing us where we need to be, with increased student engagement in the texts and discussions.

The other one that very much came across to us was related to our fifth commitment. The culturally and linguistically responsive (CLR) strategies that are in Wit & Wisdom really resonated with our district. With balanced literacy, we picked our own texts. If we had a book that we felt might be a little sensitive, we could say, “I'm just not going to do it.” Now, Wit & Wisdom is giving us more windows, doors, and perspectives for our students to engage with, and those rich experiences were something we wanted for our kids.

We love Wit & Wisdom for providing that frequent opportunity for students to read, discuss, and write about texts across genres, cultures, and time periods. It was a growing pain for us, but it’s pushing us where we need to be, with increased student engagement in the texts and discussions.

How did you approach professional learning for teachers?

We felt strongly that we didn’t want to set a low bar for our teachers in our first year of implementation by saying, “Just get through the first two modules, maybe the first three.” Instead, our messaging was that we were not necessarily implementing with fidelity, but we were going to implement with integrity and do our very best to provide all our learners with an exceptional learning environment.

We took the four modules, we put together our pacing guide, and we offered onboarding to our teachers over the summer. By August of 2024, we had over 92% of our teaching staff voluntarily sign up to come in over the summer and learn about the new resource! Then we really focused our monthly professional development on planning and preparation. We changed our professional learning communities to focus on the Wit & Wisdom planning protocol, and we asked teachers to use that protocol, get into the Teacher Edition (TE), and make annotations. Ultimately, our teachers just needed the space to plan and really understand what all the resources were.  We hadn’t had a TE prior to this year, so it took time to get used to teaching with one in hand and reading lessons before teaching.

Where have you seen students grow the most with Wit & Wisdom?

Multiple themes keep coming back through our implementation surveys. The amount of language that our kids are using has grown so much in this first year, and we’ve never heard the rich vocabulary that they're using now. Their writing has improved so much, and the quantity of writing is significantly higher.  We no longer have students asking us how to spell words—now, they use phonics and strategies from HD Word to encode.

Teachers were apprehensive at first going from balanced to structured literacy because they were worried that the core texts would not be engaging for students, but that absolutely has not been the case. Students relate to the characters and get really into the discussions about the characters’ struggles. 

With balanced literacy, we did turn and talks, but it was at the teacher's discretion. Now, that discourse is at strategic points throughout the curriculum, and the Socratic Seminars have been absolutely amazing. We've never had a rubric before for oral language. That language piece is so strong in Wit & Wisdom, and for us as a district, that was one of our weaker areas.

How did you support principals in becoming strong instructional leaders?

The Guided Observation for Leaders session with Great Minds® should be a requirement for any district doing an implementation. It is so good. That professional development was a complete game changer for us. Initially, we thought principals could just go in, use the digital platform, and do observations—but that didn’t work. We ended up buying principals complete sets of the TE, and now they know how to use that to look at teacher performance. They were trained on how to plan lessons, they use terms like Module Study Protocol, and they are getting to know the content and craft stages to support teacher pacing.

When principals did observations before, they didn't always know what instructional practices they should be seeing, and didn’t understand the role of student turn and talks as oral rehearsal tools. Now, they can use the TE and align it with teacher actions. They can see if pacing is off. They can see if the lesson has been modified. They can talk about rigor and productive struggle. And they now have all students in their building and across the district learning similar content at similar times during the year.

We also started doing principal learning walks together in small groups, which has allowed us to calibrate observations. I think our principals needed a safe space to ask questions and see how implementation was going at different school sites while growing their own instructional leadership.

Did you have to make any changes to your literacy block with the move to structured literacy?

Our 90-minute literacy block has been pretty stable. We did have to find an additional 25 to 30 minutes for phonics because we hadn't had a language block before, so that was new. 

I will tell you that because Wit & Wisdom does such a fabulous job with knowledge building, alignment with our science and social studies curricula was so clear for us. Our literacy block has become really interdisciplinary because so many of the units that we do for science and social studies are in Wit & Wisdom. That gave us a great opportunity to pull back make sure that all our standards are truly covered between Wit & Wisdom and our science and social studies curricula.

Any final thoughts about implementing Wit & Wisdom?

Our teachers will tell you time and time again, “I've never worked so hard, but it's the right work.” We're all coming together as a district in a way that we haven’t done before, and that's been something really special for us.

There's no perfect curriculum out there but getting a really strong curriculum like Wit & Wisdom into the hands of your teachers will support your vision as a district and lighten that teacher workload because everything teachers need is there. The text sets are curated in such a beautiful way so that all our learners can participate. There are family engagement pieces, there are really purposeful teacher notes listed in the TE, and the professional development is very strong. The support that we've had from the full team at Great Minds has been wonderful and responsive. It’s like joining a family of learners who are committed to improving student literacy outcomes for all children, and we like that.

I also have to praise our teachers and staff. Any district leader who is considering Wit & Wisdom has to go into it with a teacher's heart. I think of what our teachers are doing every day to learn, plan, and shift their instruction—they’ve set aside everything they've been trained in to take a huge leap of faith. Our teachers will tell you time and time again, “I've never worked so hard, but it's the right work.” We're all coming together as a district in a way that we haven’t done before, and that's been something really special for us.