Apprenticing Adolescents to Reading in Subject-Area Classrooms

Abstract

When middle and high school teachers reconceptualize students' classroom experience as a cognitive they begin to see the power of modeling their own strategies for reading and making sense of challenging texts in their disciplines. DESPITE THE increasing pressures for content coverage in the current high-stakes testing environment, a small but growing number of middle and high school teachers across the country are taking the time to teach about reading in their disciplines. They are learning to recognize their own complex discipline-specific reading processes and are helping their students do the same, implementing an approach we call Reading Apprenticeship.(r) These teachers' efforts have made a significant difference in attitudes and outcomes for many of their students, particularly for those who are reading well below grade level and who have given up on reading.1 Creating Communities of Inquiry Among Teachers and Students Since 1995, we and our colleagues in the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd have worked with several hundred middle and high school social studies, math, English, and science teachers in a research and professional development program focused on apprenticing students to reading in those disciplines. In this way the students can become more engaged and confident readers of challenging academic texts. The teachers with whom we work are increasingly concerned about the gap between students' ability to read assigned texts and the standards they are expected to meet. However, few middle and high school teachers see their own abilities to read subject-area texts as a powerful resource for helping students approach these texts independently, confidently, and successfully. Because most secondary content teachers have not spent much time thinking about the mental processes by which they make sense of texts in their fields, this knowledge is invisible and therefore unavailable to most of them. Although researchers have demonstrated positive effects on student achievement when teachers engage students in subject-area work through increased classroom conversation and, specifically, talk about how we read in subject areas,2 this kind of talk is rare. Helping teachers become more aware of the literacies they bring to their subject-area expertise can open up powerful resources for teachers' and students' learning.3 In professional development networks across the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as through national institutes for teacher and curriculum leaders, we and our colleagues have been helping teachers to establish a routine in their subject-area classrooms of discussing their own and their students' resourceful problem solving with texts. The Reading Apprenticeship Framework The Reading Apprenticeship approach is an instructional framework embedded in the process of teaching subject-area content, rather than an instructional add-on or additional curriculum.4 Reading Apprenticeship helps students become better readers by: * engaging students in more reading; * making the teacher's discipline-based reading processes and knowledge visible to students; * making the students' reading processes, knowledge, and understandings visible to the teacher and to one another; * helping students gain insight into their own reading processes as a means of gaining strategic control over these processes; and * helping students acquire a repertoire of problem-solving strategies for deepening comprehension of texts in various academic disciplines. At heart, Reading Apprenticeship is a partnership of expertise, drawing on what teachers know and do as readers in their disciplines and on adolescents' unique and often underestimated strengths as learners. In any apprenticeship, an expert practitioner or mentor consciously models, directs, supports, and shapes an apprentice's growing repertoire of practice. …