Topics: Implementation Success High-Quality Curriculum Success Stories

Wit & Wisdom Brings Strong Writing and English Learner Supports to Minnesota Elementary School

Alyssa Buccella

by Alyssa Buccella

August 7, 2024
Wit & Wisdom Brings Strong Writing and English Learner Supports to Minnesota Elementary School

every child is capable of greatness.

Posted in: Aha! Blog > Wit & Wisdom Blog > Implementation Success High-Quality Curriculum Success Stories > Wit & Wisdom Brings Strong Writing and English Learner Supports to Minnesota Elementary School

L Dawson Headshot

Northside Elementary School (St. James, MN) adopted Wit & Wisdom® in the 2023–2024 school year in grades K–5. We sat down with principal Liam Dawson to discuss the school’s journey to Wit & Wisdom, their approach to implementation, and the impact the curriculum has had on students and teachers. Dawson has been an educator for 13 years and just wrapped up his fifth year as principal of Northside Elementary.

Why was this the right moment for your school to switch to Wit & Wisdom and what did instruction look like before?

When I first came here, Northside was using Wonders for literacy instruction. Around the time that I arrived, the state of Minnesota offered LETRS training for free, so myself and six others in my building took the full teacher-facing training. And then we also got an email from Wonders saying that the curriculum was going extinct. So it became the perfect time to look at a change. At that point I talked to my instructional leadership team and asked them, “When we are looking at potential resources, are we looking for something that’s more of the same, or are we looking for something that’s truly different and that’s going to be best for our kids?” And they were all saying, “We want something different.”

So I brought six potential options to our staff and we went through an 18 month review process with the goal of narrowing it down to two or three contenders by the end of the 2021–2022 school year. Knowing that we wanted something different and something more in line with the science of reading, I used resources from the Knowledge Matters Campaign quite a bit, I looked at Louisiana Believes, and at a lot of resources from that lens to form our list of options.

Once we narrowed it down to the top two, which were Wit & Wisdom and another knowledge-building curriculum, I brought the rest of the staff into the review process, and we went on some site visits to different schools to see both resources in action. Then I built out a survey with a force rank vote between the two options and some Likert scale questions about the importance of authentic texts, an English learner (EL) connection, supports for special education students, diverse texts, and things like that. I told staff that they didn’t have to agree with the decision that was ultimately made, but we were looking to find consensus and to move forward with the resource that would be best for our kids. The results of the vote were wider than I thought they would be: It ended up being a 60/40 split in favor of Wit & Wisdom. So it was nice to see that and see that staff felt like we were at consensus, so we made the decision to move forward with Wit & Wisdom from there.

We did also look at some foundational programs as well. We looked at Fundations and UFLI, and we decided to go with UFLI pretty quickly after we piloted both programs. We saw some incredible things in year one of implementing UFLI. Staff asked if we would be able to use UFLI with the other knowledge-building curriculum we were considering; that wouldn’t have been possible because it had an embedded foundational skills program, so some staff did choose Wit & Wisdom because it meant that they could use UFLI too.

“We would get to choose what foundational resource is best for our kids if we went with Wit & Wisdom, and I appreciated that flexibility from a leadership standpoint so that we had the opportunity to really look at what would work best for the kids here in our building.”

When we first started working with Great Minds, that was one of the things that stood out to me: If we went with Wit & Wisdom, any foundational skills program could work with it. That was a big takeaway for myself, and that was something that I lead with to my leadership team. We would get to choose what foundational resource is best for our kids if we went with Wit & Wisdom, and I appreciated that flexibility from a leadership standpoint so that we had the opportunity to really look at what would work best for the kids here in our building.

What were you seeing that lead you and your leadership team to look for a knowledge-building curriculum?

I think that’s a multifaceted answer for us. For context, we are 64 percent Hispanic or Latino, 33 percent white, and 3 percent everything else. In my time here in St. James we have grown from 26 percent English learners to roughly 45 percent, and we’ve got a large migrant population. Our previous resource didn’t have a solid vocabulary build or way to support our EL students, so that was one of the big things that our EL staff appreciated about Wit & Wisdom: all of the vocabulary that was going to be embedded within daily conversations and the multiple touchpoints to develop that piece. The other knowledge-building resource we were looking at didn’t have the same sustained length of time on a given topic, and it was missing that solid build of lessons so that students were able to develop a true conceptual understanding of the content.

I also noticed a lot of teachers were stuck in that mindset of, “This is main idea and supporting details week. Now on to sequence of events week.” So very much a skills-based approach versus understanding that we can talk about main idea, and we can talk about sequence of events, but also build on and circle back to the content. So as we were reviewing, staff enjoyed seeing the Focusing Question Arcs within Wit & Wisdom and the different pieces that were there to support a knowledge-building approach.

And then the last piece is that, in 2012, Northside was a school that was in need of growth. It was one of the lowest-performing schools in the state, and then three years later it was a celebration school, and then in 2020 we were named a National Blue Ribbon School for exemplary achievement gap closing. The school went through a huge transformation in eight years, and then my first year as principal was the year of the pandemic, which caused a shift that we really needed to look at. We really felt that having a knowledge-building curriculum with a sustained amount of time on a variety of topics and connection to science, social studies, and some deeper literary content was going to be a huge benefit for our EL population. We also previously had no writing resource, so we wanted something that was strong in writing, and we loved that writing was embedded in Wit & Wisdom rather than something we had to add on separately.

When I became principal and took the LETRS training and I saw where the state of Minnesota was going, and I wanted to find a curriculum that I felt aligned with where the state was headed. Now we feel like we’re a year ahead of where everybody else is at in light of the passage of the Minnesota READ Act.

What factors led you to choose Wit & Wisdom, particularly given your EL population?

“We wanted something that our [EL] students would see themselves in, something that would help support their writing, and we also liked the instructional strategies built into Wit & Wisdom.”

When looking at it from an EL perspective, my EL staff didn’t feel that the vocabulary was going to be as rich in the other resource we were considering, and the more we talked about it, we felt like the other resource was a little too Eurocentric compared to what Wit & Wisdom was offering. We ultimately felt like our kids would be able to see themselves more in Wit & Wisdom. The Multilingual Learner Resource has been very helpful; teachers use that quite a bit to help support building some prior vocabulary and writing skills so that when they get to a Focusing Question Task or an End-of-Module task, students are able to be successful. We wanted something that our students would see themselves in, something that would help support their writing, and we also liked the instructional strategies built into Wit & Wisdom.

Screenshot 2024-08-07 at 9.12.36 AM

The art embedded in Wit & Wisdom was also a huge positive that staff talked about. They said our special education and EL students were participating even more with those art lessons, and my art teacher ran with that and did some wood block painting related to The Great Wave and has found different ways to build on those connections. So that’s been a huge positive force as well.

And then we also purchased Geodes® texts. Those were mainly used this past year by our EL and special education staff, but I did have some teachers toward the end of the year who started to use them in our intervention block where we target students based on skill need. One teacher who used the Geodes texts a lot in the spring had heard that Geodes would be this piece to really unlock student learning, and when she finally started using them, she just said, “Yup, I see it. Now the kids are making these additional connections in their core lessons that they got from this Geodes text,” and other teachers are saying that too. My EL staff love the Geodes texts as well and that additional support that they offer.

What professional development or other supports did teachers receive throughout the year?

We started last summer with the Launch Wit & Wisdom professional development (PD) session with Great Minds and then we did the Module & Lesson Study session as well. At the time my staff had said it was really great PD, and then they had some time over the summer to get into the Module & Lesson Study protocols. We also have any new staff that come in do the Launch and Module & Lesson Study Virtual Open Enrollment sessions so that they get the same 12 hours of PD that all staff got in person.

During the school year, PLCs were dedicated time to look at Wit & Wisdom and instructional planning. What a lot of teams ended up doing was at PLCs they would talk about the Focusing Question Arc of a module and the next week’s worth of lessons that they anticipated they’d be able to get through. Then teachers would do the Lesson Study Protocol on their own. We also built some things from a support lens to help in future years. The staff in each grade level typed into a shared document when they were working together on the Module Study Protocols so that new staff who come into our building had a resource to reference to see what might be coming up throughout a given module.

Throughout the school year we also had some additional PD with Great Minds. We did Guided Observations for Leaders in the fall and in the spring, and we did another PD session in March, which gave staff the opportunity to ask some more questions. And then I had some different leadership pieces for myself as well to really think through how I could help support staff from a coaching standpoint. The Teaching and Learning Progression has been really helpful for that, and we’ve used it in some of our faculty meetings.

We also did some work around standards alignment. I built a color-coded vertical articulation document where we identified and made sure that we have vertical alignment of all the state standards so that we know and can see how those are being covered, whether that’s in UFLI or within Wit & Wisdom. That will continue to be a focus for us in year two now that we’ve spent a year teaching.

After year one of implementation, what impact are you seeing on student success?

One of the fears from our grades 3–5 teachers was around how Wit & Wisdom was going to transfer to a state test, but our staff felt the knowledge build of the curriculum and the Socratic Seminars did help quite a bit when it came to that state assessment. Preliminarily, when we look at our data, our grade 5 students performed 10 percent better than they did last year as grade 4 students on the state reading assessment. We also use the FAST screener three times per year, and we exceeded what FAST had projected as the number of students who would meet benchmark on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA) by about eight kids. So we were excited to see that.

"…We really noticed incredible growth in student writing…When they were making wall panels for didactic wall poems at the end of module one in grade 3, teachers had said, ‘This writing that they just produced for this wall panel is better than what our now fourth graders did for writing at the end of last year.’ So we saw some immediate gains there."

Anecdotally, we really noticed incredible growth in student writing. The change was even noticeable at the end of module one for our grade 3 kids. I’d talk to grade 3 teachers, and they would say, “What they just wrote for this End-of-Module task is incredible.” When they were making wall panels for didactic wall poems at the end of module one in grade 3, teachers had said, “This writing that they just produced for this wall panel is better than what our now fourth graders did for writing at the end of last year.” So we saw some immediate gains there. The fact that we had students who were able to regularly write multi-paragraph essays at our intermediate level was great to see. And the last time we had staff from another school in our building for a site visit it was with our kindergarteners who were working on writing a paragraph and on understanding that a sentence is a statement that produces a thought. Being able to hear a kindergartener adequately answering what a statement is and what the purpose of a sentence is had people looking at us saying, “Are you kidding?”

We can see the knowledge and the skills developing, and we are excited to see what the transfer looks like going into year two. I kept joking that aside from kindergarten feeling like Groundhog Day because those teachers get a new group of kids every year, we should hopefully then see that continual growth over time with kids and their understanding of what the instructional strategies look like—using bullets and boxes and how that changes, utilizing the graphic organizers, how to participate in the Socratic seminars, and all of that.

What advice would you give other educators about implementing Wit & Wisdom?

I think my advice is to be mindful of the value of PD and, no matter what implementation looks like in a given district, make sure that you have leaders who really have a solid understanding of what Wit & Wisdom has to offer and who is going to help support implementation. If there’s the capacity for districts to utilize the PD that’s available from Great Minds, I highly recommend it.

Another piece of advice is that teachers need time. To do something well, there’s got to be time dedicated to it, and teachers will have to be prepared. They’re not going to be able to just walk in and pick up a book and teach a lesson. There’s some pre-work that’s got to be done ahead of time. That’s where I think the Module and Lesson Study protocols come in and really help staff internalize what’s coming.

And then, finally, understanding that implementation is a process. It’s a multi-year process, and success is not going to happen overnight. It’s going to look different depending on where you’re at, and you’re going to see some strengths and growth areas. The key is being able to identify those in a structural way so you can make adjustments and provide that guaranteed and viable curriculum.

Submit the Form to Print

Topics: Implementation Success High-Quality Curriculum Success Stories