The curriculum assigns or recommends portraits of heralded pioneers: Leonardo da Vinci, Sacagawea, Clara Barton, Duke Ellington, Ada Lovelace. They provide “mirrors and windows,” allowing readers both to see themselves in the stories and to learn about other people’s lives. Wit & Wisdom’s hundred and eighteen “core” texts, which range from picture books to nonfiction, emphasize diversity, but not in a strident way. The materials are challenging by design: studies have shown that students read better sooner when confronted with complex sentences and advanced vocabulary. By immersing students in “content-rich” topics that spark lively discussion, the curriculum prepares them to tackle more complicated texts. Great Minds’s promotional materials explain that Wit & Wisdom is designed to let students “read books they love while building knowledge of important topics” in literature, science, history, and art. After the selection committee ratified the teachers’ choice, the school board, which has twelve members, unanimously adopted Wit & Wisdom, along with a traditional phonics program, for K-5 students. Wit & Wisdom was the overwhelming favorite. The committee presented four options to teachers, who voted on them in February, 2020. Williamson County Schools assembled a selection committee-twenty-six parents, twenty-eight elementary-school teachers of English and Language Arts. The Tennessee State Board of Education governs academic standards and updates them every five or six years, providing school districts with an opportunity to switch curricula. The decision had followed a strict process. Both Massachusetts and Louisiana-states with sharply different political profiles-gave Wit & Wisdom high approval ratings. The program, which is published by Great Minds, a company based in Washington, D.C., wasn’t a renegade choice: hundreds of school districts nationwide had adopted it. In August, 2020, Williamson County Schools, which serves more than forty thousand students in suburban Nashville, started using an English and Language Arts curriculum called Wit & Wisdom.
0 kommentar(er)
