Scores Show Student Growth with Wilton Schools’ New ELA & Reading Program 

While there may have been resistance to implementing the state-mandated English Language Arts (ELA) programs for grades K-3, local education officials said they are pleased with the growth they see so far since adopting it. 

Even though the required changes were targeted to kindergarten through third grade, Wilton is currently implementing programs for kindergarten through fifth grade. Curriculum leaders reported to the Board of Education last Thursday, Feb. 5, as to how those students are doing, with first grade growth particularly standing out.

First graders came in at 61% proficiency in the fall, but they grew to 83% in the winter, according to Wilton Public Schools K-8 Humanities Curriculum Coordinator Karen Brenneke.

“As a cohort, they’re making about two-and-a-quarter years worth of growth, which is just remarkable,” Brenneke said in an interview this week. “So we’re thrilled about that.”

Students are given the NWEA MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) assessment three times a year to measure student growth in particular subjects.

“So in between those windows, we’re looking for growth because that’s how we measure our progress towards securing standards,” Brenneke said. 

She added that second grade has been at status quo since their pilot year last year. 

However, the second grade DIBLS results — another literary assessment — are higher than they were last year. DIBLS stands for Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills.

“DIBLS measures their ability to decode, and it’s really kind of a measure for independent reading, which is what we’re looking for by the end of grade two,”  Brenneke said. “And we’re at 84% right now, on track for being at that mark, which is higher than we were with our previous programming.” 

In kindergarten, the district is seeing a 12% jump in proficiency over last year’s group, Brenneke said.  

“So we don’t have growth data yet, but that’s an indicator moving in the right direction,” she said. 

While the previous program used by the district before the implementation took a balanced literacy approach, the new program has a structured literacy approach, “which just means it’s grounded in the science of reading,” Brenneke explained. 

At the forefront of this approach is phonics and knowledge building, starting in kindergarten with English language arts instruction including a skills block where teachers focus on alphabetic code including decoding, encoding and writing. Then there is also a knowledge block, grounded in oral language development, with teacher-read texts where kids are “reading with their ears” and doing critical thinking, Brenneke said.

“But writing has a very structured approach to it as well, securing first the basic sentence, then compound and complex sentences, then paragraphs in various structures before moving to multi-paragraph essays in grade three,” Brenneke said.

While there may be some lagging in decoding skills in third grade at the moment due to the transition into the program, Brenneke said she believes that will rebound next year. 

“And because we went all in, K-to-5 this year, we’re going to get that acceleration much faster, so just phenomenal,” she said.  

At last week’s Board of Education meeting, Sue Prata, a humanities coach at Cider Mill School, told the board that the program has “empowered kids to be architects of their own learning.”

Prata told a couple different stories to the board to highlight this point, including one she called “the popcorn story.”  She recalled how a group of fourth grade students — who are also in the second year of the program, but are with teachers who are in the first year of instructing the program — were working on comparing sentences. 

The assignment was to ask why the author would choose one sentence over another, and to discuss. Many students were eager to share their thoughts, but one student in particular caught their attention. He said what he learned in the previous year’s class, followed by other students saying where they had learned the same lesson and so on, Prata recalled. 

“And it was like watching little kernels of popcorn just expanding across the room. And one after another, the kids were naming teachers, naming when, naming how they learned about coordinating conjunctions the year previous,” she said. “And so this story is really the story of the power of coherence of a program.”

Brenneke said the student response has been so positive because it requires critical thinking and expects all learners to access grade-level text. 

“That’s a big difference from our previous program where we put kids in just-right texts, which sometimes would be two years below grade level,” she said. “This, instead of changing the text for the learner, we engineer the text to be accessible for all learners. So we might chunk it for them, but it’s still at grade level. And I think that that’s a huge reason our students are responding the way they are, especially with these growth numbers.” 

She added that the district sends home letters to caregivers of students from kindergarten to fifth grade so they know what students are learning. 

“We want to be transparent with it because we know it’s important to the community,” Brenneke said.

Board of Education Chair Ruth DeLuca said at the meeting that she is happy to see the early indicators of a curriculum that is working. 

“And so there are going to be things that work and things that don’t and being able to come to the table and share what works and what doesn’t and reconfigure how we move forward and making sure that our staff is supported in a way that pushes things in the right direction, I think, has really been a hallmark of what’s been going on over the last couple of months and what I see with you all presenting today,” DeLuca said. “So I think that also is really powerful.”