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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Clear, on-the-ground guidance for Reading Apprenticeship implementation Leading for Literacy provides tools and real-life examples to expand the benefits of a literacy approach that sparks students' engaged reading and thinking across disciplines, from middle school through community college. A companion to the landmark Reading for Understanding, this book guides teachers, leaders, and administrators through the nuts, bolts, benefits, and stumbling blocks of creating Reading Apprenticeship communities that extend a culture of literacy beyond individual classrooms. This book explains how to generate authentic buy-in from teachers and administrators, use the Reading Apprenticeship Framework to turn reform overload into reform coherence, and create literacy teams, professional learning communities, and Reading Apprenticeship communities of practice that sustain an institutional focus on a student-centered, strengths-based culture of literacy. Key insights from Reading Apprenticeship practitioners across the country address how to get started, build momentum, assess progress, and build partnerships and networks across schools, districts, campuses, and regions. Persistently low levels of adolescent literacy continue to short-change students, contribute to discredited high school diplomas, and cause millions of students to drop out of high school and community college. Forty percent or more of community college students require remedial reading courses as college freshman. The researchers at WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative developed the Reading Apprenticeship Framework to provide educators with a proven path to improving literacy for all students, and this book provides clear guidance on bringing the framework to life. * How to integrate Reading Apprenticeship with existing reform efforts * How to use formative assessment to promote teacher and student growth * How to coach and empower teachers * How to cultivate literacy leadership * How to provide long-term support for a strong content-literacy program Nationwide classroom testing has shown Reading Apprenticeship to promote not only literacy and content knowledge, but also motivation and positive academic identity--leading to better student outcomes that reach beyond the classroom walls. Leading for Literacy lays out compelling ways to spread the benefits of Reading Apprenticeship, with practical guidance and real-world insight.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of Close-Ups
List of Team-Tools
Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1: How to Start?
Taking Up Transformational Change
Leading Change at the Middle and High School Level
Opportunities for Scale‐Up at the Community College Level
Using External Pressures to Move Toward Local Goals
Turning Reform Overload into Reform Coherence
Chapter 2: Partnering for Leadership
How Administrators Contribute
How Teacher Leaders Contribute
Chapter 3: The Role of Inquiry in Reading Apprenticeship Professional Learning
Why Inquiry?
Targeting Key Teacher Learning Goals
Building Professional Capacity to Advance Student Literacy
Chapter 4: Setting the Social and Personal Foundations for Inquiry
Setting Norms for Collaboration and Risk Taking
Sharing Personal Reading Histories
Setting Learning Goals
Principles for Team Inquiry
Chapter 5: Exploring Reading as Colleagues
Metacognition at the Center
Engaging in Reading Process Analysis
Engaging in Text and Task Analysis
Finding Texts (and Matching Them to Inquiries)
Chapter 6: Exploring Instruction as Colleagues
Looking Closely at Practice
Looking Closely at Student Work
Building Pedagogical Knowledge
Observing in Colleagues’ Classrooms
Reflecting on Growth
Chapter 7: Building Capacity, Momentum, and Sustainability
Building Capacity System‐Wide: A Canadian Case Study
Increasing Expertise
Expanding Strategically
Staying the Course
Appendix A: Reading Apprenticeship Framework
Appendix B: The Research Rationale for Inquiry‐Based Teacher Professional Development
A Focus on Student Learning
Collective Participation
Active Modes of Learning
Building Coherence
Inviting Adaptive Expertise and Generative Problem Solving
Outcomes of Our Studies
Appendix C: Assessment Tools
Reading Apprenticeship Teacher Practice Rubric
Reading Apprenticeship Student Learning Goals
Curriculum‐Embedded Reading Assessment (CERA) Guidance and Tools
Reading Apprenticeship Metacognitive Funnel
What Does a Reading Apprenticeship Classroom Look Like?
NOT
Reading Apprenticeship
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
Preface
Figure 1
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Leading for Literacy
A Reading Apprenticeship Approach
Ruth SchoenbachCynthia GreenleafLynn Murphy
Copyright © 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-Bass
A Wiley Brand
One Montgomery Street, Suite 1000, San Francisco, CA 94104-4594—www.josseybass.com
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Permission is given for individual classroom teachers to reproduce the pages and illustrations for classroom use. Reproduction of these materials for an entire school system is strictly forbidden.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.
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Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.
The contents of this book were developed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Investing in Innovation (i3) Program, grant number U396B10025. However, these contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education nor endorsement by the federal government.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schoenbach, Ruth, author. | Greenleaf, Cynthia, author. | Murphy, Lynn, author.
Title: Leading for literacy : a Reading Apprenticeship approach / Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Lynn Murphy.
Description: San Francisco, CA : Jossey-Bass; Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2016. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016027834 | ISBN 9781118437261 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781119321309 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781119321675 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Literacy programs. | Reading promotion.
Classification: LCC LC149 .S39 2016 | DDC 379.2/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027834
Cover Images and Author Photos: © WestEd
Cover Design: Christian Holden
List of Close-Ups
Close-Up 1.1
:
Priming the Pump at Chelsea High School
Close-Up 1.2
:
Leading from Community Needs
Close-Up 1.3
:
Starting with a Group of One
Close-Up 1.4
:
Galvanizing a Campus Around Reading
Close-Up 1.5
:
SSR Plus: We're Going to Read for Two Minutes
Close-Up 1.6
:
Accounting for Reading Apprenticeship in a School Improvement Plan
Close-Up 2.1
:
Chelsea District Takes Charge
Close-Up 2.2
:
Campus Institutionalization Budget Proposal
Close-Up 2.3
:
Finding Resources in Community College Budgets
Close-Up 2.4
:
Winning Parents' Stomachs, Hearts, and Minds
Close-Up 2.5
:
Representative Secondary School Team Meetings
Close-Up 4.1
:
Personal Reading Histories: Building Team Community
Close-Up 5.1
:
Capturing the Reading Process Reflection
Close-Up 5.2
:
Reading History with a Not Historian
Close-Up 5.3
:
Two Sample Reading Strategies Lists
Close-Up 5.4
:
Interacting Areas of Reading: History Textbook Example
Close-Up 5.5
:
Text-Free Think Aloud Practice
Close-Up 5.6
:
The Red Badge of Courage Think Aloud
Close-Up 5.7
:
Talking to Dr. Seuss
Close-Up 5.8
:
Why Have Students Talk to the Text?
Close-Up 5.9
:
Previewing a Research Paper Abstract
Close-Up 5.10
:
Querying Questions with a Disciplinary Focus
Close-Up 5.11
:
Inferences and Text Interactions
Close-Up 5.12
:
Word-Learning Strategies List
Close-up 5.13
:
Expert and Novice Readers All
Close-Up 5.14
:
Differing Disciplinary Claims
Close-Up 6.1
:
Text and Task Analysis of an Instructional Unit
Close-Up 6.2
:
Oh, This Is What Student-Centered Means
Close-Up 6.3
:
History Unit Descriptive Consultancy
Close-Up 6.4
:
A Reading Interview as a Student Work Sample
Close-Up 6.5
:
Representative History Students' CERA Self-Assessments
Close-Up 6.6
:
Four Teachers' First Inquiry into Students' CERAs
Close-Up 6.7
:
Teachers Reflect with the Reading Apprenticeship Teacher Practice Rubric
Close-Up 7.1
:
Manitoba Reading Apprenticeship Professional Learning Models
Close-Up 7.2
:
Sample Classroom Visit Notes
Close-Up 7.3
:
Takeaways from a Leadership Team Coaching Model
Close-Up 7.4
:
Sample Reading Apprenticeship Teacher Leader Meeting Agenda
Close-Up 7.5
:
Please Let Them (Us) Talk!
Close-Up 7.6
:
West Senior High Five-Year Plan
Close-Up 7.7
:
Pinckney High School's Rock 'n RAAL
Close-Up 7.8
:
Getting Concrete at Northern Essex Community College
Close-Up 7.9
:
The Reading Apprenticeship Difference in a First-Year Experience Program 228
List of Team-Tools
These resources are available to be downloaded from the Reading Apprenticeship website, http://readingapprenticeship.org/publications/downloadableresources/Permission is given for individuals to reproduce these for use in leading Reading Apprenticeship professional learning. No other reproduction of these materials is permissible. (See explicitly the copyright page of this volume.)
Team Tool 3.1
:
A Phylogenetic Investigation for Not-Biology Teachers
Team Tool 3.2
:
What May an Arrow Mean?
Team Tool 4.1
:
Norm-Setting Protocol for Team Participation and Accountability
Team Tool 4.2
:
Personal Reading History Protocol
Team Tool 4.3
:
Inquiry into Teacher Practice Goals
Team Tool 4.4
:
Principles for Team Inquiry
Team Tool 5.1
:
Guidelines for Conducting Reading Inquiries
Team Tool 5.2
:
Capturing the Reading Process Inquiry
Team Tool 5.3
:
Interacting Areas of Reading Inquiry
Team Tool 5.4
:
Ways to Use Various Reading Process Analysis Routines
Team Tool 5.5
:
Think Aloud Inquiry
Team Tool 5.6
:
Talking to the Text Inquiry
Team Tool 5.7
:
A Sampling of Metacognitive Note Takers for Multiple Purposes
Team Tool 5.8
:
Wondering About Words Inquiry
Team Tool 5.9
:
Tracking Concept Development
Team Tool 5.10
:
Interpreting Disciplinary Practices Inquiry
Team Tool 5.11
:
Exploring Argumentation Inquiry
Team Tool 5.12
:
Text and Task Analysis Inquiry
Team Tool 6.1
:
Collaboration Protocols for Exploring Instruction
Team Tool 6.2
:
Implementing Reading Apprenticeship: The First Four Weeks
Team Tool 6.3
:
A Progression for Building Metacognition in Shared Class Reading
Team Tool 6.4
:
Identifying Routines and Scaffolds Note Taker
Team Tool 6.5
:
Reading Apprenticeship Framework Activity Planner
Team Tool 6.6
:
Planning and Support Conference Protocol
Team Tool 6.7
:
Contextualizing Your Reading Apprenticeship Lessons
Team Tool 6.8
:
Reading Apprenticeship Lesson Design Template
Team Tool 6.9
:
Check-In, Exchange, Reflect Protocol
Team Tool 6.10
:
Chalk Talk Protocol
Team Tool 6.11
:
Reading Apprenticeship Descriptive Consultancy Protocol
Team Tool 6.12
:
Authoring Your Own CERA
Team Tool 6.13
:
Easing into the CERA Rubric
Team Tool 6.14
:
Student Work Protocol with Text and Task Analysis
Team Tool 6.15
:
Student Work and Student Learning Goals Protocol
Team Tool 6.16
:
What Counts as Student Work?
Team Tool 6.17
:
Mapping Reading Apprenticeship onto the Danielson Framework
Team Tool 6.18
:
Mapping Standards with Reading Apprenticeship Student Learning Goals
Team Tool 6.19
:
Team Favorites for Professional Reading and Talking
Team Tool 6.20
:
The Golden Line and Last Word Protocols for Discussing a Text
Team Tool 6.21
:
Sources of Classroom Vignettes for Exploration
Team Tool 6.22
:
Exploring Classroom Vignettes Protocol
Team Tool 6.23
:
What Does a Reading Apprenticeship Classroom Look Like?
Team Tool 6.24
:
Classroom Observation Protocol
Team Tool 6.25
:
Evaluating a Range of Framing Questions
Foreword
I AM ALWAYS happy to find people in our field who combine theory and practice as part of their professional DNA. And I am especially pleased when that work has a clear focus on empowering students through critical literacy — needed now more than ever. This book, the result of several decades of work by the authors and their colleagues, is rooted in a critical literacy approach they call Reading Apprenticeship, which deeply integrates theory and practice. The work this book describes also happens to have a long record of research showing positive impact for student learning, which of course is another strong plus.
While everyone agrees that all students deserve great teaching and that all teachers will benefit from meaningful support, we also know that we must invest our professional learning dollars and time wisely. Those of us who have long advocated for professional learning know that there are qualities that set highly effective teacher learning efforts apart from traditional professional development. The Reading Apprenticeship approach builds on teachers' own knowledge and expertise, challenges teachers with new research‐based insights, and provides structured opportunities for them to explore their own reading and comprehension processes as a foundation for apprenticing students to reading, writing, thinking, and speaking in the different disciplines. Ultimately, this approach expands teachers' visions of their students' capabilities.
The authors of this book bring us something rare in their lively tour of schools, districts, college campuses, and larger networks. Rather than instances where teachers simply learn a set of strategies, the authors offer powerful examples of professional learning communities engaging in deep inquiry into the many ways of reading and responding to texts in different disciplines. They show us how these reading inquiries can lead not only to profound changes for students in individual classrooms but also across schools, systems, and statewide networks.
Teacher leaders, administrators, and others interested in building strong inquiry communities to strengthen disciplinary literacy will find many practical steps, examples, and insights for adapting their own Reading Apprenticeship work. Readers will also find stories of teachers' and administrators' resourcefulness and persistence throughout this book.
As someone who has advocated for this kind of embedded and reflective professional development for years, I especially appreciate several of the themes the authors explore in Leading for Literacy:
Building teachers'
generative knowledge
— beyond learning to employ a set of reading strategies in classrooms, teachers become able to make the kind of moment‐to‐moment professional judgments needed to help students develop dispositions necessary for academic engagement and success;
Creating clear structures for collaborative work among teams of teachers who are working to improve their practice, and grounding that work in classroom‐based formative assessment;
Encouraging teachers to spend time not only discussing student work and lesson designs, but also to focus on close examination of their own reading processes, with challenging texts in their disciplines;
Emphasizing the importance of teacher leadership, teacher–administrator collaboration, and administrators' involvement to support and sustain a new intervention, like the Reading Apprenticeship Framework; and
Acknowledging the real impact of initiative fatigue and helping educators understand how Reading Apprenticeship is at the leading edge of school improvement initiatives and can serve to bring other initiatives together.
Stepping into the stories and hard‐won lessons of this book, I found myself encouraged by visions of hopeful futures for our middle schools, high schools, and colleges — with vibrant professional learning at the core. I hope you will find some of that same inspiration here.
Preface
WHAT DOES it take to organize and promote a culture of literacy throughout a school, a district, or a college campus? How can one person or a committed small group get started, engage others, and sustain a focus on improved disciplinary literacy? And what can be learned from the experiences of others who have successfully spread deep change in classroom practice across many different contexts?
This book provides tools, examples, and some principles to help spread the benefits of a research proven instructional approach—Reading Apprenticeship—that sparks students' engaged reading and thinking across disciplines and from middle school through college. As a companion to the landmark Reading for Understanding, this book guides teacher leaders and administrators through the nuts and bolts, benefits and challenges of creating Reading Apprenticeship communities that can extend a culture of literacy beyond individual classrooms.
In Leading for Literacy, we explain how to generate authentic buy‐in from teachers and administrators, use the Reading Apprenticeship Framework to turn reform overload into reform coherence, and create literacy teams, professional learning communities, and Reading Apprenticeship communities of practice that sustain an institutional focus on a student‐centered, strengths‐based culture of literacy.
Key insights from Reading Apprenticeship practitioners across the country address getting started, building momentum, assessing progress, and building partnerships and networks across schools, districts, campuses, and regions. Tools and approaches developed by WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative provide concrete help for building knowledgeable teams and creating coherence across system priorities:
How to integrate Reading Apprenticeship with existing reform efforts;
How to use formative assessment to promote teacher and student growth;
How to coach and empower teachers;
How to cultivate literacy leadership; and
How to provide support for a strong, long‐term, content‐literacy program.
Nationwide classroom research on Reading Apprenticeship1 has shown that the approach promotes literacy, content knowledge, and motivation — leading to better student outcomes that reach beyond classroom walls.
What You Need to Know Before Reading This Book
Many readers may be familiar with Reading Apprenticeship through our website www.readingapprenticeship.org or our book about classroom practice—Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Literacy in Secondary and College Classrooms. Others may have participated in some related professional learning. And still others may be picking up this book as a general introduction for leading school‐ or system‐level literacy improvements. Whatever the case, this book, like the Reading Apprenticeship Framework, suggests a unique approach to enacting change—not a regimented program or particular set of materials. In diverse settings and across a wide range of situations, the Reading Apprenticeship Framework is a powerful tool for designing classroom and professional learning. Its implementation is a continuous process of inquiry and reflection and is most successfully accomplished in the company of others.
What Is the Reading Apprenticeship Framework?
A full explanation of the Reading Apprenticeship Framework can be found on the Reading Apprenticeship website2 and in Chapter Two of our earlier book, Reading for Understanding.
The Reading Apprenticeship Framework emphasizes these approaches:
Making students' reading processes, motivations, strategies, knowledge, and understandings visible to the teacher and to other students;
Helping students gain and learn to use insight into their own reading processes;
Helping students develop a repertoire of problem‐solving strategies for overcoming obstacles and deepening comprehension of texts from various academic disciplines; and
Making the teacher's discipline‐based reading processes and discourse knowledge visible to students.
Figure 1 is a snapshot of the Framework's key elements. The Framework's four interacting dimensions of learning—social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge‐building—reflect the importance of supporting learners' affective as well as cognitive learning processes.
Figure 1 The Reading Apprenticeship Framework
The Social Dimension addresses community building in the classroom, including recognizing the resources brought by each member and developing a safe environment for students to be open about their reading difficulties.
The Personal Dimension includes developing students' identities and self‐awareness as readers, as well as their purposes for reading and goals for reading improvement.
The Cognitive Dimension focuses on developing readers' mental processes, including their problem‐solving strategies.
The Knowledge‐Building Dimension supports students in identifying and expanding the kinds of knowledge that readers bring to a text and further develop through interaction with that text.
Within and across these dimensions, the Framework promotes metacognitive conversation: through internal metacognitive conversation, students learn how to monitor their reading comprehension; through external metacognitive conversation, students learn from the reading processes of others and collaborate to build knowledge.
All of this takes place in the context of extensive in‐class opportunities for students to practice reading in more skillful ways.
How Have Educators Been Involved in the Development of Reading Apprenticeship?
For more than twenty‐five years, teachers have been our partners in thinking about the Reading Apprenticeship Framework, in trying out tools for best implementing it, in helping to define the elements of effective professional learning, and by participating in numerous research studies that lend validity to and guide the continuous improvement of Reading Apprenticeship.
In the past decade, WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative, the developer of Reading Apprenticeship, has won five multiyear federal grants to increase and study the reach of Reading Apprenticeship. The largest of these, Reading Apprenticeship Improving Secondary Literacy (RAISE), was designed to study a five‐state scale‐up of Reading Apprenticeship. RAISE impacted close to 2,000 teachers and over 600,000 students. Secondary schools in the study worked to sustain a focus on disciplinary literacy while increasing and sustaining Reading Apprenticeship implementation with fidelity for multiple years. Many RAISE teachers and administrators share their experiences in this book.
Other voices in these pages are those of teachers and administrators whose schools or districts have contracted with us, the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd, for professional development and coaching services. The community college practitioners represented here include instructors who helped us design our first forays into postsecondary settings, as well as more recent partners and faculty members who are now helping design campus‐wide first‐year experience programs, tutoring programs, acceleration programs, and a range of curriculum reform efforts.
Administrators, too, have contributed to our learning about how to effect literacy improvement and education change. In the most successful implementations of Reading Apprenticeship, administrators are active, knowledgeable participants on literacy teams and advocates for long‐term support of teacher learning. You will hear from many of them.
How Is This Book Organized?
In this book we address questions about how to implement deep changes in teaching—Reading Apprenticeship in this case—and we present ideas about multiple implementation paths. Broadly speaking, the book offers three chapters that explore guidelines and examples for successful Reading Apprenticeship implementation (Chapters One, Two, and Seven), one chapter that grounds the rationale for our approach to professional learning (Chapter Three), and three chapters that present tools for implementation (Chapters Four, Five, and Six).
Chapter One, “How to Start?” sketches paths schools and colleges have taken toward implementation. These include models where teachers lead, where impetus for change comes from administrators, and where external pressures can be used to meet internal goals. Chapter Two, “Partnering for Leadership,” considers the roles of administrators and teacher leaders in promoting buy‐in for deep, school‐wide change. Chapter Three, “The Role of Inquiry in Reading Apprenticeship Professional Learning,” presents the rationale and theoretical foundation for the approach to professional learning we advocate and describe in the following three chapters.
The first of these tools chapters is Chapter Four, “Setting the Social and Personal Foundations for Inquiry.” It offers guidelines for creating conditions for productive adult learning. Chapter Five, “Exploring Reading as Colleagues,” moves to the core practice that distinguishes Reading Apprenticeship professional learning. We urge readers who are committed to implementing Reading Apprenticeship to make this chapter the center of their work. We believe that when school leadership teams attempt to work on system‐level change without practicing the core Reading Apprenticeship routine of making your thinking visible with varied types of texts, the implementation loses power. A more typical and very important aspect of professional exchange, talking about teaching, is the focus of Chapter Six, “Exploring Instruction as Colleagues.” Included are many protocols for looking closely at practice and at student work and for building pedagogical knowledge.
Chapter Seven, “Building Capacity, Momentum, and Sustainability,” addresses some of the most challenging—and productive—aspects of implementing Reading Apprenticeship at a systemic level. Here we offer examples of districts and schools where this work is playing out in ways unique to local contexts and with lessons, we hope, for others.
Acknowledgments
We like to think of the Strategic Literacy Initiative as a professional learning community where staff members' good will, good humor, and dedication to our collective work contribute to all we do. These particular past and current staff were instrumental in supporting the development of this book: Willard Brown, Irisa Charney‐Sirott, Gayle Cribb, Gina Hale, Heather Howlett, Rita Jensen, Margot Kenaston, Diane Lee, Cindy Litman, Kate Meissert, Mary Stump, and Lorelle Wien. We also include our partners at home, Lynn Eden, Paul King, and Peter Shwartz, who encourage us without fail in devoting ourselves to this work that we love.
For particular participation in the life of this book, we thank Nika Hogan, who coordinates our community college work, for her invaluable insights and introductions to the growing network of college faculty implementing Reading Apprenticeship. We also call special attention to the roles played by our colleagues in the five‐state, five‐year federal Investing in Innovation (i3) grant— Reading Apprenticeship Improving Secondary Education (RAISE)—multistate coordinator Cathleen Kral, and statewide coordinators Susan Kinney and Melissa Devlin of Pennsylvania, Bill Loyd of Michigan, and Donna Walker of Indiana. The warm professional relationships they developed over many, many statewide RAISE teacher leader meetings and visits to schools and classrooms gave us access to those same schools and classrooms for dozens of the interviews for this book, not a few of which Sue and Bill conducted.
More than anything, Leading for Literacy represents the work and feedback of hundreds of teachers and administrators who directly helped us think through the challenges of building learning communities in which the Reading Apprenticeship Framework guides a sustained focus on literacy. We thank them deeply—for their generosity allowing us into their schools and classrooms, for their teaching chops, and for the difference they make in the lives of their students.
Contributing Teachers and Administrators
The educators listed below contributed directly and generously to the shaping and content of this book. Many are quoted throughout.
Myriam Altounji:
Counselor, Pasadena City College, Pasadena, Calif.
Heather M. Arena:
Teacher of English, Exeter Township Senior High School, Exeter, Penn.
Gretchen Bajorek:
Literacy Coordinator, Edsel Ford High School, Dearborn, Mich.
Dianna Behl:
New Tech Director/Assistant Principal, Pinckney Community High School; Pinckney Community Schools, Instructional Coach, Pinckney, Mich.
Scott Buchler:
Principal, Northwest High School, Jackson, Mich.
Arlene Buchman:
Coordinator of Professional Development 6‐12, Souderton Area School District, Souderton, Penn.
Krista Carey:
Reading Specialist, Abington High School, Abington, Penn.
Scott M. Casebolt:
Principal, Edsel Ford High School, Dearborn, Mich.
Angela Church:
As cited: Teacher of Grade 9 U.S. History, Berkley High School, Berkley, Mich. Currently: Reading Apprenticeship and Instructional Coach, Berkley High School.
Ann Coe:
Assistant Principal, Holt High School, Holt, Mich.
Kay Cole:
Teacher of English and Teacher Coach, Berkley High School, Berkley, Mich.
Amanda Corcoran:
Instructor of English, American River College, Sacramento, Calif.
Anna Corral:
Principal, Anaheim High School, Anaheim, Calif.
Jackie Counts:
District English Curriculum Specialist, Anaheim Union High School District, Anaheim, Calif.
Rob Cushman:
Teacher of Biology, Wyomissing Area Junior/Senior High School, Wyomissing, Penn.
Scott Davie:
As cited: Principal, Titusville High School, Titusville, Penn. Currently: School Counselor, Talawanda High School, Oxford, Ohio.
Julie Deppner:
As cited: Principal, Chelsea High School, Chelsea, Mich. Currently: Assistant Superintendent, Chelsea School District.
Melissa Devlin:
As cited: Teacher of Reading and English and Literacy Coach, Wyomissing Area Junior/Senior High School, Wyomissing, Penn. Currently: Director of Curriculum, Instruction, and Literacy, Antietam School District, Reading, Penn.; and Pennsylvania State Coordinator, Strategic Literacy Initiative.
David Donohue:
As cited: Professor of Education, Mills College, Oakland, Calif. Currently: Senior Director of the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good and Professor of Education, University of San Francisco.
Catherine England:
Faculty, Adult Basic Education, Everett Community College, Everett, Wash.
Kevin English:
Teacher, Wayne‐Westland Community School District, Wayne, Mich.
Moninda Eslick:
Academic Facilitator, Francis Bradley Middle School, Huntersville, N.C.
Tess Ferrara:
As cited: Teacher of English and Teacher Coach, Berkley High School, Berkley, Mich. Currently: Literacy Consultant.
Ann Foster:
Instructor of English, Santa Rosa Junior College, Santa Rosa, Calif.
Tracy Francis:
As cited: Teacher of Science and Teacher Coach, Berkley High School, Berkley, Mich. Currently: Educational Consultant.
Shawn Frederking:
Instructor of English, Yuba College, Yuba City, Calif.
Charlene Frontiera:
Dean of Mathematics and Science, College of San Mateo, San Mateo, Calif.
Randall Gawel:
Principal, Berkley High School, Berkley, Mich.
Janet Ghio:
Consultant, Strategic Literacy Initiative, WestEd, Oakland, Calif.
Jake Gilboy:
Social Studies Department Head, Abington High School, Abington, Penn.
Emily Gonzalez:
Professor in the Natural Science Department, Northern Essex Community College, Lawrence, Mass.
Rebecca Graf:
Director of Humanities, Charlotte‐Mecklenberg Schools, Charlotte, N.C.
Debbie Harman:
Director of Student Learning, Brown County Schools, Nashville, Ind.
Lilit Haroyan:
Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, East Los Angeles College, Montery, Calif.
Joan Herman:
Instructor of English, Lower Columbia College, Longview, Wash.
Katie Hern:
English Instructor, Chabot College, Oakland, Calif.; and California Acceleration Project Co‐Founder.
Cindy Hicks:
Emerita Instructor of English, Chabot College, Oakland, Calif.
Nika Hogan:
Associate Professor of English, Pasadena City College, Pasadena, Calif.; Community College National Coordinator, Strategic Literacy Initiative; Reading Apprenticeship Project Director, 3CSN.
Tiffany Ingle:
Instructor of English as a Second Language, Pasadena City College and Glendale Community College, Pasadena and Glendale, Calif.
Sara K. Jones:
Teacher of Social Studies, Titusville High School, Titusville, Penn.
Vicki Jones:
Director of Language Arts Services, Abington School District, Abington, Penn.
Amy Keith‐Wardlow:
Literacy Coordinator, Fordson High School, Dearborn, Mich.
Charles Kolbusz:
Assistant Principal, West Senior High School, Traverse City, Mich.
Lisa Krebs:
Teacher of English, Dixon High School, Dixon, Calif.
Becky Leist:
Administrator, Concord Academy‐Boyne, Boyne City, Mich.
Michele Lesmeister:
Faculty, Basic Studies Department, Renton Technical College, Renton, Wash.
Mary Ann Liberati:
Consultant, Strategic Literacy Initiative, WestEd, Oakland, Calif.
Laurie Lintner:
Literacy Coordinator, Dearborn High School, Dearborn, Mich.
Theresa Martin:
Professor of Biology, College of San Mateo, San Mateo, Calif.
Walter Masuda:
Dean of Arts, Humanities, and Education, Yuba College, Yuba City, Calif.
Michael Matsuda:
Superintendent, Anaheim Union High School District, Anaheim, Calif.
Beth May:
Instructional Coach, Avon High School, Avon, Ind.
Andy McCutcheon:
As cited: Instructor of English, College of the Canyons, Santa Clarita, Calif. Currently: Interim Dean, School of Humanities, College of the Canyons.
Ryan McMahon:
Principal, Milan High School, Milan, Mich.
Cindy Miceli:
Teacher of Science, Anaheim High School, Anaheim, Calif.
Allyson Morcom:
Teacher of World Studies, Abington High School, Abington, Penn.
Catherine Morrison:
Literacy Coordinator for Middle Schools, Dearborn Public Schools, Dearborn, Mich.
Youssef Mosallam:
Principal, Fordson High School, Dearborn, Mich.
Barbara Moss:
Teacher of Biology, Abington High School, Abington, Penn.
Kathleen Motoike:
Instructor of English, Santa Monica College, Santa Monica, Calif.
Naomi Norman:
Interim Assistant Superintendent, Achievement and Student Services, Washtenaw ISD and Livingston ESA, Mich.
Chris Padgett:
Professor of History, American River College, Sacramento, Calif.
David Pfaff:
Principal, Eastern Hancock High School, Charlottesville, Ind.
Daniel S. Pittaway:
Student Success Coordinator, Coastline Community College, Westminster, Calif.
Dawn Putnam:
Teacher of English, Chelsea High School, Chelsea, Mich.
Julia Raddatz:
Principal, Manistee High School and K–12 Curriculum/Testing Director, Manistee, Mich.
Shane Ramey:
Professor of Biology, College of the Canyons, Santa Clarita, Calif.
Harley Ramsey:
Principal, Otto‐Eldred Junior‐Senior High School, Duke Center, Penn.
Curtis Refior:
Consultant, Strategic Literacy Initiative, WestEd, Oakland, Calif.
Allyson Robinson:
As cited: Assistant Principal, Harrison High School, Farmington Hills, Mich. Currently: Principal, Power Upper Elementary School, Farmington Hills, Mich.
Kellie Rodkey:
Assistant Principal, Avon High School, Avon, Ind.
Wayne Roedel:
Superintendent, Fowlerville Community Schools, Fowlerville, Mich.
Marcia Rogers:
Instructor of English, Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa, Calif.
Shelagh Rose:
Associate Professor of English as a Second Language and First Year Pathways Faculty Lead, Pasadena City College, Pasadena, Calif.
Alicia Ross:
Teacher of History, Blue Ridge High School, New Milford, Penn.
Adina Rubenstein:
Teacher of Science and Teacher Coach, Berkley High School, Berkley, Mich.
Janet Rummel:
Chief Academic Officer, Goodwill Education Initiatives, Indianapolis, Ind.
Abdiel Salazar:
Teacher of Grade 6, Freemont Elementary School, Stockton, Calif.
Patricia Schade:
Professor of Academic Preparation, Northern Essex Community College, Lawrence, Mass.
Melody Schneider:
Fulltime Faculty of High School Completion Department and Faculty Development Coordinator, Edmonds Community College, Lynnwood, Wash.
Lauren Servais:
Instructor of English, Santa Rosa Community College, Santa Rosa, Calif.
David Simancek:
Principal, Swartz Creek Academy, Swartz Creek, Mich.
Kristine Simons:
As cited: Principal, Covert High School, Covert, Mich. Currently: Assistant Superintendent, Curriculum and Instruction, Benton Harbor Area Schools, Benton Harbor, Mich.
Debbie Swanson:
Reading Apprenticeship Teacher Leader, Willow Run 6–8 Intermediate Learning Center, Willow Run, Mich.
Jennifer Taylor‐Mendoza:
Dean of Academic Support and Learning Technologies, College of San Mateo, San Mateo, Calif.
Eric Turman:
Principal, Reading High School, Reading, Penn.
Ricci Ulrich:
Principal, Buchanan High School, Clovis, Calif.
Samuel A. Varano, Jr.:
Principal, Souderton Area High School, Souderton, Penn.
Julia Vicente:
Superintendent, Wyomissing Area School District, Wyomissing, Penn.
Shelley Warkentin:
English Language Arts and Literacy K–12 Consultant, Manitoba Ministry of Education and Advanced Learning, Manitoba, Canada.
Kay Winter:
Literacy Coach and English Department Chair, Anderson High School, Anderson, Ind.
Lori Wojtowicz:
Teacher of English, Huron High School, Ann Arbor, Mich., retired.
Douglas Womelsdorf:
As cited: Teacher of Science, Pleasant Valley High School, Pleasant Valley, Penn. Currently: Science Curriculum Specialist, Northeastern Educational Intermediate Unit (PA IU19).
Notes
1
. Four randomized controlled trials of Reading Apprenticeship have found statistically significant mediating impacts of Reading Apprenticeship teacher professional development on student achievement:
Fancsali, C., Abe, Y., Pyatigorsky, M., Ortiz, L., Chan, V., Saltares, E., Toby, M., Schellinger, A., & Jaciw, A. P. (2015). The impact of the Reading Apprenticeship Improving Secondary Education (RAISE) project on academic literacy in high school: A report of a randomized experiment in Pennsylvania and California schools. (Empirical Edcuation Rep.No. Empirical_RAISE‐7019‐FR1‐OO.2). Palo Alto, CA: Empirical Education Inc.
Greenleaf, C., Hanson, T., Herman, J., Litman, C., Rosen, R., Schneider, S., & Silver, D. (2011). A study of the efficacy of Reading Apprenticeship professional development for high school history and science teaching and learning. Final report to Institute for Education Sciences, National Center for Education Research, Teacher Quality/Reading and Writing, Grant # R305M050031.
Greenleaf, C., Litman, C., Hanson, T., Rosen, R., Boscardin, C. K., Herman, J., Schneider, S., with Madden, S., & Jones, B. (2011). Integrating literacy and science in biology: Teaching and learning impacts of Reading Apprenticeship professional development. American Educational Research Journal, 48, 647–717.
Somers, M.‐A., Corrin, W., Sepanik, S., Salinger, T., Levin, J., & Zmach, C., with Wong, E. (2010). The enhanced reading opportunities study final report: The impact of supplemental literacy courses for struggling ninth‐grade readers (NCEE #2010‐4021). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.
2
.
Reading for Understanding
Chapter 2
: The Reading Apprenticeship Framework is a free download available from the Reading Apprenticeship website:
http://readingapprenticeship.org/wp‐content/uploads/2014/01/RFU‐Ch‐2‐Excerpt.pdf
Chapter OneHow to Start?
We want reading to be woven into the fabric of what is happening on our campus, to put reading into every conversation about student success, whether it is equity, first‐year experience, basic skills, even accreditation—and to connect those conversations and initiatives.
—Chris Padgett, American River College history instructor
DISCIPLINARY READING—the reading that middle school, high school, and college teachers assign day after day in class after class—is foundational to students' success. For anyone in doubt, new academic standards and workforce expectations make the demand for academic literacy emphatically clear. What is less clear is how to support students to achieve that literacy‐based, future‐oriented success.
For many if not most administrators, teachers, students, and parents, these new expectations may require a paradigm shift in understanding how learning happens best. This shift includes new ways of thinking about the relationship of literacy to subject area content, students' and teachers' roles in learning, and, most important, students' potential for critical thinking and disciplinary reasoning. Change of this depth cannot spread beyond a few classrooms and is not sustainable without system‐level support.
The Reading Apprenticeship Framework,1 developed to promote students' engaged academic literacy, has a solid history of catalyzing this kind of transformative change—for individuals and within institutions.
Taking Up Transformational Change
Reading Apprenticeship makes a difference in the way people teach and the way kids learn, but it's not something you can say, “We're doing this tomorrow,” and have it be done tomorrow. It takes time and energy, and some patience and commitment from all parties involved.
—Randy Gawel, Berkley High School principal
To implement and scale up meaningful change in classrooms, teachers must deeply understand and own the goals and principles of such change. Many interventions focus on structural or cultural change in school climate or governance as the way to improve student outcomes. Other interventions focus on improving students' engagement and achievement by changing what happens in the classroom. Reading Apprenticeship is in this second category, with a focus on transforming classroom interactions between teachers and students, between students and their peers, and between students and texts of all types.
As an intervention with an explicit focus on changing classroom practice, Reading Apprenticeship takes a strengths‐based approach to how both teachers and students learn. Reading Apprenticeship first shows teachers how to make visible the “invisible” knowledge they already have of how to read with rich comprehension in their own content areas. This process then enables teachers to help students become aware of their own thinking processes, giving them confidence and skills to solve comprehension problems and to read more deeply.
To take the risks involved in trying out new ways of teaching, teachers need significant support from their schools and districts. Such support includes new structures, such as dedicated literacy teams and communities of practice, and more time to engage in high‐quality professional learning, professional collaboration, and problem solving with colleagues. These challenging professional activities also require political cover on the part of site and district administrators to protect teams and their time from challenges that may arise in the community or at higher levels in the system.
Successful education reform includes the awareness that each school, district, and college campus is particular and resists cookie‐cutter replication of even the most rigorously proven interventions. A context‐sensitive approach to Reading Apprenticeship implementation calls for a balance of flexibility and fidelity. Teachers and systems require the flexibility to make Reading Apprenticeship their own. At the same time, for interventions to be effective, integrity to the core principles is crucial. We have seen and heard about too many “toxic mutations” of Reading Apprenticeship not to urge educators to keep the key elements of Reading Apprenticeship—the Framework, an inquiry stance, and a strengths‐based approach—front and center. Without these core principles, implementation cannot achieve the powerful change that is required to improve learning for a large number of students.
In this chapter, we offer examples to suggest how educators in secondary schools and on college campuses can start to extend Reading Apprenticeship into the broader system in which they work. Familiar questions surface:
How can teachers, convinced from their own experience of the effectiveness of Reading Apprenticeship, create opportunities for
genuine
buy‐in from other teachers and administrators?
Are there ways administrators can initiate classroom change without the well‐known pitfalls of top‐down implementation?
How can leadership teams turn external mandates into positive steps to meet their own goals for change?
How can schools incorporate Reading Apprenticeship without adding to reform overload?
As we take up these questions, it is with the understanding that the avenues for introducing Reading Apprenticeship are different at the secondary and college levels. Each institutional structure creates different opportunities for instructional leadership and supports professional learning in parallel but different ways.
Leading Change at the Middle and High School Level
Reading Apprenticeship can't be seen as an extra program, it can't be seen as a one‐off. It has to be embedded into professional development and revisited.
—Janet Rummel, Chief Academic Officer for Goodwill Education Initiatives, Excel Centers2
Reading Apprenticeship sometimes spreads from one or two teachersat a middle or high school who have discovered Reading Apprenticeship on their own and are sharing it informally with colleagues. More commonly administrators concerned about students' academic literacy hear about Reading Apprenticeship through professional connections and make the decision to bring it to their faculty, often as an experiment for a few teachers to try but sometimes with top‐down expectations for wider implementation.
Whether the initial energy to address student literacy comes from teachers or administrators, for that energy to grow, others in the system need to see evidence that local classrooms are changing and students are benefiting. So, for example, teachers who have felt frustrated with their ability to support their students' disciplinary literacy but then experience success using Reading Apprenticeship approaches need opportunities to share with colleagues what they and their students are learning.
If schools already have professional learning structures in place, such as professional learning communities or department teams, these can be a base for bringing attention to disciplinary literacy and strengthening what it means to collaborate for the benefit of students. And if Reading Apprenticeship arrives at a school or district as more of an expectation than an invitation, increased support for teacher learning and shared administrative and faculty responsibility can create safe space for taking on the challenge of transforming educational practice.
Building Excitement from Teacher to Teacher
Secondary school administrators who have shepherded Reading Apprenticeship implementation cite teacher‐to‐teacher excitement as the bottom line for success. They find that the enthusiasm of teachers whose students are benefiting from Reading Apprenticeship is highly contagious.
When Randy Gawel was a relatively new principal at Berkley High School, he received an announcement that a team from his school could participate at no cost in a literacy professional development study.3 He asked two teachers for their opinions of the offer. The teachers were impressed, so he forwarded the announcement to the entire staff. Those two teachers and three others replied that they were interested in spending a week of their summer vacation learning about Reading Apprenticeship and getting ready to try it out in their classes.
Randy remembers the energy those five teachers brought to the beginning‐of‐the‐year staff meeting when he asked faculty members to describe what they were looking forward to: “Every one of those Reading Apprenticeship teachers independently said—and these were great teachers—‘I'm looking forward to implementing Reading Apprenticeship in my classroom, and it's going to change the way I teach, and it's going to change it for the better.’”
Over the following school year the five teachers worked as a team to implement Reading Apprenticeship in their own classes. They deliberately avoided trying to train staff. Instead, with the support of their principal, they shared with their colleagues what they were experiencing and what they were excited about.
At Chelsea High School, it was also the principal, Julie Deppner, now Chelsea district assistant superintendent, who learned about Reading Apprenticeship through her administrative network. But again, it was well‐regarded teachers who primed the pump for what Julie calls “a huge cultural shift at the school.” (See Close‐Up 1.1, Priming the Pump at Chelsea High School.)
CLOSE‐UP 1.1
Priming the Pump at Chelsea High School
At Chelsea High School in Chelsea, Michigan, it took only two teachers to prime the pump for what principal Julie Deppner calls “a huge culture shift.”
I certainly had to pick the right people to start off in the Reading Apprenticeship model, teachers who were excited about it and well respected by their peers—and then trust them. They took ownership of Reading Apprenticeship, and we embraced it after hearing them talk about what they were doing in their classrooms.
The two teachers who became the Reading Apprenticeship pioneers supported one another in the ups and downs of trying a new teaching approach. Their principal encouraged them to share what was happening in their classes with the staff. When Reading Apprenticeship professional development was made available to more staff, a combination of concrete results and peer pressure turned the tide. Julie describes the teacher‐to‐teacher nature of scaling up Reading Apprenticeship at the school:
We had two teachers from the math department that went to the training because they just wanted to be better teachers. They said, “If this can have an impact on what I'm doing in my classroom, I want to go.” They came back excited, and they sold it to others in the department.
Teachers saw it was great for kids. If you hadn't gone to the training, you felt like you were missing out. You wouldn't know what they were talking about in the teacher's lounge. Reading Apprenticeship has changed the way our teachers teach and the way they think about learning.
As Sam Varrano, principal of Souderton High School, points out, when pioneer teachers have the opportunity to share their Reading Apprenticeship experiences with the rest of the staff, a persuasive appraisal will include the challenges as well as the benefits of learning new practices:
We looked for teachers we knew would embrace it, our very best lunatic‐type people, and who would promote it when they were being successful and honestly share their setbacks so we could get better.
By offering these pioneer teachers' experiences to other staff, and making it clear the administration held them in high regard, Sam was able to convince a strategically important second group of teachers—whose peers would recognize them as typically more reluctant to try new things—to give Reading Apprenticeship a chance. “Once you get those people on board and they're talking highly of it,” he says, “there's no stopping that momentum.”
Building on Existing School Culture and Structures
Increasingly, secondary schools support teacher learning with structures such as professional learning communities and literacy teams. Reading Apprenticeship's inquiry model of professional development can be an organic way to animate this kind of faculty collaboration.
The Reading Apprenticeship teacher leaders at Berkley High School are quick to credit the school's history of collaboration as an important factor in their evolution as a team—and in their colleagues' openness to the Reading Apprenticeship literacy teams they have nurtured. Teacher leader Angie Church tracks the school's move toward collaboration from her vantage point of sixteen years on the staff:
Over the course of those years we moved from a school of all teachers who taught in isolation to a building in which teachers talked to each other about what they were doing in their classrooms. We had content professional teams throughout our building. It seems super simple, but that's huge. Because we were immersed in it, we might not have noticed how big that was.
Buchanan High School is another school where professional learning communities (PLCs) long predated Reading Apprenticeship. At the same time, however, Buchanan's principal, Ricci Ulrich, worried that the PLCs had lost some of their edge as learning communities. The Reading Apprenticeship model of teacher inquiry, she says, has brought new life and meaning to the school's PLCs:
We've always had a very collaborative staff. Since its inception Buchanan has had teacher time to work together built into the school day. But over a number of years, it was a lot of informational meetings and department meetings, but not working in teams or establishing a set of common goals or really going after an instructional model with something that tells us the kids are having success.
Now when teachers are meeting as PLCs, it's a much different conversation. I believe Reading Apprenticeship helped us establish goals and become diagnostic. The focus is on what the kids are doing, very specifically tied to literacy. That's a big culture shift for us. This is very authentic, very different, and ties back to the adults having a higher level conversation about what we can do instructionally so students have more success.
Top‐Down Change as a Positive Path?
Although many stories of successful Reading Apprenticeship implementation initially involve small numbers of teachers or faculty, there are also cases at the secondary level in which administrators have successfully introduced Reading Apprenticeship and still managed to avoid faculty skepticism or resistance that sometimes typifies mandated professional learning initiatives.
David Pffaf, principal of Eastern Hancock Middle School and High School in rural Charlottesville, Indiana, heard about a high school grant‐funded Reading Apprenticeship professional development opportunity from an acquaintance at the Indiana Department of Education and decided to investigate. Convinced that the Reading Apprenticeship program addressed the needs of his school's students, he worked to persuade his staff, laying out students' reading competence as the school's overriding academic responsibility:
There's just nothing our kids are going to do when they leave here where reading is not going to be an essential, foundational skill. So what is there that we can do that would be more valuable to our kids than to give them this tool, this ability to read something that is not easy to read? I can't think of a job we have that's more important.
Eastern Hancock is a small high school, with only thirty‐two teachers. None of them escaped David's vision for advancing the school's literacy culture, and he included himself as a learner along with his teachers:
If the principal doesn't believe this is really, really important, then don't bother. The principal has to be fully in. The principal can't send some teachers off and then be done with it.
In another small school district, the superintendent and the principal of the combined junior–senior high school took steps to initiate a focus on literacy after interviews with local employers and nearby colleges and universities led them to understand that improved academic literacy was the most important service they could bring to their community. They found Reading Apprenticeship as a place to start. To signal district commitment, principal Harley Ramsey participated with faculty members in Reading Apprenticeship professional development and further prepared to lead the effort by taking a Reading Apprenticeship course designed specifically for principals. (See Close‐Up 1.2, Leading from Community Needs.)
CLOSE‐UP 1.2
Leading from Community Needs
At Pennsylvania's small Otto‐Eldred School District, administrators were concerned that the teaching and learning there had stagnated. In a community with intergenerational poverty and high unemployment, they wanted to be sure their graduates would be prepared to meet the demands of local employers and higher education. Superintendent Matt Splain and high school principal Harley Ramsey met with leaders from regional industries and colleges to find out what they wanted from incoming employees and students. What they found out, Harley says, led the district to a tight focus on literacy. “We asked a few very basic questions: What are you looking for—what types of education, what types of skills? We took all that information and synthesized it. The areas of need boiled down to content area literacy.”
Working backward from this community input, the district administrators asked themselves what they needed to provide from an experiential and curriculum standpoint to make sure that students would be truly college and career ready. “That's when we started looking at adjusting our curriculum, adjusting our pathways,” says Harley. “That's when I first started looking at Reading Apprenticeship.”
Harley echoes a point that other school leaders have made when using Reading Apprenticeship for deep school‐wide change.
You can't approach it as, “We are going to be doing Reading Apprenticeship.” It has to be literacy, and then the model that you're using is the Reading Apprenticeship model. Initiatives come and go, but literacy has to stand.
Once teachers understand, “Okay, this is our objective, this is our duty, this is where we're going from a literacy perspective,” then they'll see, “Oh, Reading Apprenticeship fits that perfectly. Why wouldn't we use it?”
When principals, district leaders, or a team of teacher leaders and others can communicate a strong vision and provide teachers with time and support to learn about and try out Reading Apprenticeship for themselves, a top‐down approach can lead to positive results. The only way this can work, however, is if supports are in place to help teachers grow into new practices that involve deep changes in their professional identify, their ways of relating to students, and sometimes in their conception of their discipline.
One of the advantages of a top‐down approach to such innovations is the opportunity to build systems of support that include in‐depth professional learning, curriculum, coaching and feedback, and explicit articulation with teacher evaluation.
Two examples of Reading Apprenticeship implementations that have been designed for large‐scale rollout and comprehensive support are described in Chapter Seven. These models, from Canada's Manitoba Province (see “Building Capacity System‐wide: A Canadian Case Study”) and the 18,000‐teacher Charlotte‐Mecklenburg Schools (see “Building Momentum for a District‐wide Rollout”), generously invest institutional resources in the service of deep, iterative teacher learning.
Opportunities for Scale‐Up at the Community College Level
Our campus is a place now where more faculty who aren't in the reading department are willing to concede that their students need help.
—Amanda Corcoran, American River College English instructor
Compared with their colleagues in secondary schools, college faculty members enjoy considerable instructional autonomy, and they have many more opportunities for initiating instructional change within and beyond their classroom walls. Interest in Reading Apprenticeship on a college campus typically begins with one or two entrepreneurial instructors willing to engage others and then leverage initial interest across departments or into campus‐wide programs.
Originally, Reading Apprenticeship found its way onto college campuses as a way to address the literacy needs of underprepared students. Its use has spread from remedial applications into a wide range of subject area departments. Many instructors are starting to see that their own disciplinary ways of reading can be a powerful resource for apprenticing students. Additionally, colleges' attention to student engagement and a focus in recent years on growth mindsets and productive persistence has helped faculty see how the Reading Apprenticeship Framework's attention to the social and personal dimensions of classroom life and metacognitive conversation connect to goals they and their colleagues have for their students.
Reading Apprenticeship is also becoming more common in campus‐wide programs like new‐faculty seminars and student first‐year experience courses that depend on a design partnership between faculty and college administrators.
Statewide networks for the scale‐up of Reading Apprenticeship on college campuses are also emerging. As described in Chapter Seven, this work is supported by a vibrant California network (see “Communities of Practice: An Educator‐Led, State‐Supported Network”) and another that is building momentum in Washington. (See “Building a Statewide Network from a Spark.”)
Inviting Colleagues to Take a Look
Many college faculty are keenly aware of how little they have been prepared to apply learning theory and effective instructional practices to the disciplinary expertise they have developed. Concerns about students' needs for literacy support are particularly vexing.
Biology instructor Shane Ramey's experience is representative of what college faculty are increasingly recognizing as a new responsibility to their students. Shane teaches honors molecular and cellular biology at College of the Canyons. He was uneasy about whether his advanced students were understanding the course content:
I asked my students to raise their hands if they had read either—or both—of the two chapters we were scheduled to cover during the day's lecture. I was disappointed, but not surprised, that not a single student raised a hand.
At American River College, a campus‐wide survey asked instructors to take a look at their students as readers. The survey is designed to create a portrait of students' expectations, preparation, and the background they bring to courses where faculty assign academic reading. Instructor Chris Padgett, co‐director of the campus Reading Apprenticeship Project, says the reading survey, developed with the college reading and research divisions, is useful because it offers a fairly quick, efficient portrait of the state of reading on campus. “With any luck,” Chris says, “it will have an effect on the ways folks think about reading here and its place in the overall goal of student success.”
Inviting faculty members to take a look at their students' reading needs is a first step. What happens next often has a persistent individual involved. That was certainly the case at Northern Essex Community College where Trish Schade first brought attention to Reading Apprenticeship and nurtured an increasingly supportive campus‐wide response. (See Close‐Up 1.3, Starting with a Group of One.)
CLOSE‐UP 1.3
Starting with a Group of One
About a decade ago, Trish Schade was one of the very first college instructors to take a look at how Reading Apprenticeship might provide disciplinary support for student literacy. She was a member of a small inquiry group of California instructors trying out Reading Apprenticeship in their college classes. When she later moved across the country—from California's Merced Community College to Northern Essex Community College in Massachusetts—she was eager to share Reading Apprenticeship with her new colleagues, but no one had heard of it. Trish needed ways to get their attention.
One way she built interest in Reading Apprenticeship was through paired courses she taught with other faculty. In her classes, students were learning Reading Apprenticeship routines. Before long, Trish says, her faculty partners were noticing and asking her about her teaching: “What are you doing to get the students so engaged?”
Trish also decided to start a Reading Apprenticeship inquiry group. She wasn't sure who would show up, so she invited professional tutors, lab coordinators, and librarians as well as faculty across disciplines. The group that assembled monthly was small but persistent. They tried out Reading Apprenticeship strategies, presented to others, and slowly grew in numbers and confidence.
Now, the Reading Apprenticeship inquiry group has developed into the college‐supported Transitions to Academic Success Initiative, and Reading Apprenticeship approaches have become integral to the first‐year seminar at Northern Essex. The college administration, pleased with the team's contribution to student literacy, asked the group to bring their focus on academic literacy to the most rigorous classes on campus—gateway courses in the academic disciplines. For example, Emily Gonzalez, who now co‐chairs the Transitions team with Trish, has been instrumental in spreading interest in Reading Apprenticeship to members of her science department.
Starting with a group of one, Trish and then Emily and others who saw the promise of Reading Apprenticeship built a grassroots movement to make academic literacy a campus‐wide mission.
Making Use of Campus Structures for Professional Learning
When campus interest in Reading Apprenticeship develops, instructors who take the initiative to introduce Reading Apprenticeship to others may first have gotten up a little steam simply by inviting faculty members to visit a class where they are trying out Reading Apprenticeship approaches.
More formally, enthusiastic teachers can use college structures for professional learning, as Trish Schade did with a campus FIG4 at Northern Essex Community College.
