Back in September, we shared the initial stages of our Year 1 implementation of Wit & Wisdom ELA across our elementary schools (Kindergarten through grade six.) While the meme reflects a twinge of humor, in all reality, as with any long term project, it is always powerful to reflect on just how far we’ve come since that initial post. What started as a somewhat insurmountable pile of materials on pallets has turned into compelling student conversations centered around academic texts; books turned into vehicles for building background knowledge and cardboard boxes turned into “Boxes and Buttons.”
How It Started
As discussed in our September blog post, we chose Wit & Wisdom for a myriad of reasons. Wit & Wisdom completes the puzzle that is a high quality, comprehensive literacy program for elementary students in Pentucket that follows the research behind how students learn to read, and each piece of the curricula serves a purpose when considering Scarborough’s Rope. All of these pieces are carefully aligned to our district’s comprehensive Literacy Plan. This plan, developed with the input of many stakeholders, served as a road map when identifying our current status of literacy and where we would like to go next.
High quality curricula cannot stand alone. The National Institute for Education Sciences makes a number of recommendations for districts and schools implementing new curricula based on their research that we have found useful:
Focus on Leaders First
Our administrators across all four elementary schools have participated in extensive professional development alongside their teachers going back three years before adopting Wit & Wisdom. Back before the pandemic, administrators participated in the Northshore Leadership Series, a localized network of like minded district administrators and reading researchers who came together multiple times throughout the year to engage in professional learning around the Science of Reading and setting up systems to support a school’s literacy achievement. Since then, we have continued this work with our leaders by engaging in a literacy grant from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, as well as leadership retreats and coaching around giving feedback, supporting teachers, and developing systems in our schools to support all students in learning how to read. This Guide for Principals by the Center on Instruction outlines levers that principals can use to have the greatest influence on the quality of literacy instruction in their schools.
2. Create time, structures, and formal roles to support ongoing, school-based collaborative professional learning.
It is important to note that this step began in Pentucket over four years ago and is still a work in progress. Guided by our literacy plan and a vision for all students to become proficient readers, as well as principles grounded in reading research, administrators at the district level began working with building leaders and teachers on building systems that prioritize literacy instruction for all students. These systems include a master schedule that sets aside sufficient time for both foundational skills instruction and Wit & Wisdom, as well as time for intervention for students who need more support. These schedules are created with all personnel in mind. That is, while the classroom schedules are made, the support personnel’s schedules are made in tandem, for consideration of who is available to support and when. This allows for multiple professionals, such as reading specialists and special educators, to work with students during intervention blocks and small group instruction, to close gaps and support all students. In addition, all teachers at each grade level have daily common planning time, during which they are able to collaborate and plan lessons.
3. Adopt a research-based instructional rubric to guide conversations about teaching and learning with the curriculum.
Conversations about teaching and learning are essential if you want to improve teaching and learning. This is especially true when implementing new curricula like Wit & Wisdom. Though many instructional practices and routines are embedded into the lessons, there are best practices for instruction that cannot be lost. At times, the lessons and the content of the curriculum can be daunting and overwhelming. Teachers in Pentucket are careful not to use the manuals like a script, as this would make lengthy lessons even more challenging. Instead, we center conversations around best practices and focus on meeting the needs of students where they are at. Scaffolding lessons appropriately, allowing opportunities for student engagement, and differentiating instruction is the focus. These foci are consistent across K-12 in the district. Pentucket refers to this Instructional Inventory tool put out by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to guide conversations around best practices from K-12 and how they fit into using high quality curricula like Wit & Wisdom.
We also moved away from conversations around fidelity. While research shows that implementing a curriculum with fidelity is critical to its eventual success, we instead focused on implementing it skillfully. This meant that, while teachers were to stick to the bones and content of the lessons, they were able to modify and adapt in a way that fit the needs of their students and as student data indicated was necessary.
4. Anchor coaching and feedback in the curriculum.
With the rollout of Wit & Wisdom came a formal new role to the district, a Curriculum Coordinator and Coach. The Coordinator’s job is to manage all of the ELA curriculum operations, coach and collaborate with teachers, and provide professional development both formally and informally. This year, much of the feedback and coaching centered around Wit & Wisdom and supporting both new and veteran teachers. Some of the key aspects of support came from modeling lessons, compiling resources, conducting professional development, offering feedback to teachers, and planning with grade level teams. It also required time to support teachers on how to use Fundations and Heggerty effectively to teach the foundational skill components in grades K-3, as Wit & Wisdom addresses the language strands and writing components of literacy instruction. In addition, principals focused school goals and observations on Wit & Wisdom, providing feedback anchored in the curriculum and the above instructional inventory.
5. Recognize the stages of curriculum implementation and what teachers need to progress to higher stages.
While the National Institute for Education Sciences (page 24) has their own Teacher Learning Progression on Curriculum, Wit & Wisdom also guides leaders in identifying teacher internalization of the curriculum and how to support teachers in growth. Their professional development offering, Guided Observation for Leaders, was a pivotal session for administrators in navigating how to support teachers in moving forward with Wit & Wisdom.
6. Ensure that districts work closely with schools to plan for, communicate, and implement school-based professional learning that blends support for curriculum and instructional practice.
If all the prior steps are the building blocks, this here is the foundation. Our professional development over the past year has been robust, intentional, and flexible. Teachers were offered professional development in a variety of formats (virtual, in-person) across different grade level bands and provided both by Great Minds and district leaders. Sessions were created, adjusted, and removed based on classroom observations and conversations with teachers. In this way, we were able to tailor the PD to address the “here and now,” and support teachers in the rollout of Wit & Wisdom.
How It’s Going
We are still in the beginning stages of collecting end-of-year data from our comprehensive suite of literacy assessments - including iReady, DIBELS 8th Edition, and awaiting state standardized assessment data. However, preliminary data shows that our students have made tremendous progress in all areas of literacy.
This was not at the expense of foundational skills. First grade district data from September to January highlights the progress in key foundational skills as measured by DIBELS and we look forward to reviewing our end of year data as school winds down in June.
We have also seen progress in our students’ expressive language, both oral language and writing. If you walk into any classroom, you’ll hear students discussing the hardships of the food rations during the civil war, analyzing characteristics of people living on the western frontier, or discussing how students get access to books across the world. All writing and discussion is intrinsically connected to the literacy content and skills, and students have produced academic writing that is unparalleled.
A sample of a Kindergarten student writing using evidence from the text.
A 4th Grader's essay using multiple text sources.
How We’re Growing
As with implementing any high-quality curriculum, especially one with the content and rigor of Wit & Wisdom, this year was not without its growing pains. Teachers across all schools and all levels faced different challenges as they adapted to the theoretical and pedagogical shifts of a knowledge-building curriculum.
Wit & Wisdom requires that the text(s) be at the center of the instruction and student learning, and, as Liben and Pimentel discuss,
“Even teachers using excellent newly aligned programs are sometimes reverting to a strategies/skills-first use of those materials; they are struggling to implement the lessons as designed because it requires them to unlearn what they have learned over the years…”
We have dubbed this, the “Balanced Literacy Hangover,” that will take some time and coaching to move past. We will be presenting on this topic at The Reading League Annual Conference in October of 2022 in Syracuse, NY. A text-centered instructional approach, where the text is carefully analyzed by the teacher when preparing so students will be able to explore the text fully and learn from it, requires a different form of planning than readers’ workshop models. It’s about taking the intended activities and understanding the alignment among the learning goals, standards, and assessment, and then making instructional decisions that help students to reach the learning goal. This form of backwards design and planning was necessary to revisit multiple times throughout the year, and the support of the curriculum coordinator/coach and collaborative grade-level planning time helped move this process forward.
When asked, Pentucket teachers overwhelmingly cited “time” as their primary challenge with implementation. Particularly in the earlier months of the year, teachers were taking tremendous amounts of time to plan and teach each lesson. This was not sustainable for themselves nor the students in their classrooms. Once teachers got the hang of how to plan, prioritize, and analyze lesson learning goals, the planning and teaching became much more efficient. In 2017, Instruction Partners released a white paper on effective implementation of curriculum. In it, they discuss their finding that “pacing was the most common challenge identified, particularly in the first few years of implementation.” Luckily, Wit & Wisdom covers most of the grade level standards in the first three modules, which allowed us a little more flexibility in terms of “getting through the curriculum.” In general, teachers have found that they have addressed all grade level standards by this time in the year as most are somewhere in the midst of module 3. Time also involves protected time for small group instruction and intervention, particularly in the earlier grades. Thanks to the aforementioned systems, the schedule allows for this intervention to happen daily, while still dedicating enough time for Tier 1 core literacy instruction, including Wit & Wisdom.
As the year has progressed, we have worked to address the need for scaffolding the curriculum for struggling readers. This is particularly necessary considering the interrupted schooling of the past few years due to the pandemic. Wit & Wisdom is rigorous and complex, and presents a number of different barriers for student access, whether it is complex phonics patterns that students cannot decode, complex language and syntactical structures, or complex vocabulary. As Shanahan discusses often, it is our job to provide instruction that removes the barriers for students, so that all students can access the language and the content of grade level, complex text. Though scaffolds are built in, we have found the need to modify and scaffold further for students, due in part to this being their first year with Wit & Wisdom. Our special education staff have been instrumental in this process as we intentionally build additional scaffolds into lessons and provide explicit instruction in teaching students how to read such text(s). With repeated exposure to the routines and language of the curriculum, we anticipate some of this will improve each year.
Where We’re Going
The process of implementation will continue far beyond this year. We have some more professional development lined up for our teachers in August around writing with Wit & Wisdom and we are looking forward to unpacking the writing process and standards more under the leadership of Great Minds. We are also training K-2 staff in Geodes to continue to bridge the two sides of the reading rope, linking decoding skills with content and comprehension. Geodes follows the phonics scope and sequence of our foundational skill program Fundations, but also provides students with access to content and concept connections to the knowledge building topics in Wit & Wisdom. Next year, we are adopting Wit & Wisdom in the seventh and eighth grade, creating a vertically aligned curriculum from K-8 in ELA that will serve as a powerful platform for consistent, high quality, and rigorous ELA instruction across Pentucket schools.
To hear more discussion of our implementation, check out our appearance on the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Podcast.
Thinking of adopting a new literacy curriculum? In addition to creating a literacy plan, consider using some of the following resources:
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Jen Hogan
K-6 Literacy and Humanities Coach and Coordinator
Brent Conway
Assistant Superintendent