#384 – Integrating WICOR®, with Kera Diller

In this episode of Unpacking Education, we sit down with high school English teacher and AVID Site Coordinator Kera Diller to explore AVID’s WICOR^® methodology, which incorporates Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, Organization, and Reading. Kera shares how WICOR transformed her instructional planning by providing a flexible methodology rather than a rigid formula. With vivid metaphors and practical insights, she illustrates how WICOR serves as a foundation for rigorous instruction that’s adaptable across grade levels and content areas. Whether you’re a seasoned AVID educator or new to the methodology, this episode is full of relatable stories, actionable strategies, and a fresh perspective on what it means to design meaningful learning experiences for all students.

When educators create instructional experiences integrated with the rich layers of WICOR, students are actively engaged with content through productive struggle, cognitive wrestling, and critical thinking to access rigorous content from a multitude of perspectives and use it to create new innovations, challenge old ideas, and positively impact the world around them.

AVID

Resources

The following resources are available from AVID and on AVID Open Access to explore related topics in more depth:

• Implementing WICOR: Writing (article collection)
• Implementing WICOR: Inquiry (article collection)
• Implementing WICOR: Collaboration (article collection)
• Implementing WICOR: Organization (article collection)
• Implementing WICOR: Reading (article collection)

Be a WICOR Chef

“You’re not just a cook following a recipe—you’re a chef choosing the right ingredients for your learners,” says Kera Diller, and that metaphor drives this episode of Unpacking Education. Kera frames the WICOR methodology as a flexible approach to academic rigor, allowing educators to adjust their “ingredients”—Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, Organization, and Reading—to meet students’ needs and the goals of any lesson. Whether you’re planning a collaborative Socratic Seminar or building inquiry into an art class, Kera offers a vision of teaching as intentional, responsive, and creative. She emphasizes that WICOR is not a checklist—it’s a mindset and a flexible collection of strategies.

Tune in and learn how to be a WICOR chef. The following are a few highlights from this episode:

• About Our Guest: Kera Diller is a high school English and AVID Elective teacher. She is also an AVID Site Coordinator.
• WICOR: WICOR is one of AVID’s proven learning support structures. It stands for Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, Organization, and Reading.
• Like Being a Chef: WICOR is not intended to be used as a checklist. Rather, it’s a support structure that can be used strategically and intentionally to increase rigor and learning in the classroom. Kera says, “It just kind of was a game-changer for me as a teacher.” She adds, “I really have kind of grabbed onto the notion that it is more of a recipe—ingredients that you can pull together when you’re planning, and you have this recipe for rigorous instruction, and I’m gonna need a dose of this today and a dash of that. . . . It’s kind of just being a chef.”
• Standards First: Kera works with her professional learning community (PLC) to plan instruction for the week. Once they identify their nonnegotiable academic standards, she says, “Then we just kind of look, and brainstorm, and collaborate on how we can infuse any of those five [WICOR] components to maximize the rigor of the lessons.”
• Applicable to Any Content Area: Kera says that integrating WICOR is a comprehensive piece of adding rigor to any lesson for any subject. “These can be applied across all areas. I’ve seen PE teachers use it. Dance teachers use it just to really fully connect their learning and add more rigor into the thought process in order for them to retain and use transferable skills,” she explains.
• Global Readiness: Kera believes that “all students can learn at a high level and be global ready.” She tells her students, “You can’t exist very productively in a world without any of these five skills.” Every student needs to be able to write, inquire, collaborate, organize, and read.
• A Flexible Methodology: Because WICOR is so flexible and can be integrated into a lesson in many ways, Kera says, “There’s a lot of days where I shift gears, where I shift from a Jigsaw to a Socratic Seminar. . . . It’s really just being flexible and understanding that as long as those components and that framework is thought about and is intentional, then you really can’t go wrong.”
• Writing: There are many ways to integrate writing into a lesson. Kera says, “You have high stakes and low stakes.” Low stakes might be a bell-ringer start to a lesson or an exit ticket. “They [students] are usually given a low-risk question most of the year, just to . . . stretch that writing muscle.” As the year progresses, she focuses more specifically on the craft of writing and how to become a better writer.
• Writing Across the Curriculum: While English teachers tend to be the instructors who most often help students learn how to write, students can write to learn in any content area. Kera gets especially excited when she sees teachers in other curricular areas have students write to process and cement their thinking.
• Interconnections: Kera says, “They [components of WICOR] are really all interconnected.” She adds that using them in isolation is nearly impossible. For instance, writing often leads to inquiry, which can lead to collaboration, reading, and organization.
• Inquiry: Kera points out the importance of asking the right questions. This might be generating a list of questions about colleges that students want to attend. It might be engaging with customer service to resolve a concern, or it might involve more structured research. Kera says that in many ways, inquiry is an important part of adulting. Adults need to know what questions to ask in a variety of life situations.
• Collaboration: When setting students up for successful collaboration, Kera says that developing relational capacity is the key. “That is the utmost foundation of everything,” she says. With that foundation, collaboration might be both structured and complex, like when using a Jigsaw approach, or it might simply be making sure that every group member has a role, such as recorder, reporter, or timekeeper.
• Overcoming Resistance to Collaboration: To overcome resistance to collaboration, Kera believes that teachers need to convince students that they matter. She wants them to know that when they disengage, “They’re a missing piece.” She tells them, “This part is going to be missing if you don’t really work with your group.” She adds, “It [proficiency in collaboration] does not happen in one day, it doesn’t happen in one week, and it may not even happen that entire year. But it’s that insistence of ‘This is going to continue to be an expectation in my classroom.’”
• Organization: Student organization often focuses on the use of notebooks, note-taking skills, and binder checks. On another level, it can include how the classroom is organized, how information is organized, and even how our brains are organized. Graphic organizers can be helpful scaffolds for helping students learn to organize at many levels.
• Reading: Reading includes processing text, but it also means interpreting multimedia messages. Critical reading strategies apply to a wide range of information consumption experiences. Kera points out that regardless of the format, students must activate their prior knowledge and identify key vocabulary. She says that reading is much more than summarizing, with a big part of the reading process being centered on “making connections.”
• Kera’s One Thing: “You gotta go slow to go far. . . . I encourage [teachers] to just take one piece at a time and get really good at infusing it.” As they master more strategies, teachers can hone in on the ultimate goal, “to just really maximize the learning and rigor of the classroom” and equip students with skills they will need to be successful students and adults.