Reading Apprenticeship
What IS Reading Apprenticeship?
Reading Apprenticeship (RA) is a research-validated approach for improving subject area literacy in middle school, high school, and community college.
It’s a framework that can be used in any class and any discipline to help students become stronger academic readers in the disciplines they study. The RA approach helps students become proficient readers by making routine practices that address the personal, social, cognitive, and knowledge-building dimensions of readings in an inquiry based way.
Want to learn more? https://readingapprenticeship.org/college-overview/
Why it’s great for all Disciplines:
When students enter our classes, they are often reading below college-level and struggle to comprehend the texts we assign. By slowing down at the beginning of the semester and teaching students to read the way we – experts in our fields – read, we can then move through the rest of the semester much more quickly and cover more content. In content-heavy classes, this allows instructors to put responsibility on the students to read material rather than on ourselves to lecture and provide students with the information they need. It frees up time in class to let students reflect, ask questions, go deeper with discussion and comprehension. At the end of the semester, students have not only gotten the content for the class, but have learned how to better read and think like a scientist/historian/etc. and have made personal connections with the material by interacting with the texts in meaningful ways.
From the website: “Reading Apprenticeship helps college and university students from across disciplines and levels to develop advanced academic literacies, including disciplinary specific ways of reading, writing, researching and problem solving. Whether the focus is developmental, career/technical, or advanced coursework, Reading Apprenticeship is an effective framework, integrating explicit attention to disciplinary habits of mind through high impact pedagogical practices based in inquiry and metacognitive conversation.”
Dimensions of the Reading Apprenticeship Classroom and Framework:
The Following model describes the four key dimensions of classroom life that are necessary to support reading development:
- Social Dimension: 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.
- Personal Dimension: Developing students' identities and self-awareness as readers, as well as their purposes for reading and goals for reading improvement.
- Cognitive Dimension: Developing readers' mental processes, including their problem-solving strategies
- Knowledge-Building Dimension: Identifying and expanding the kinds of knowledge that readers bring to a text and further develop through interaction with that text.
These dimensions exist in the context of extensive reading and share the reading practice of internal and external metacognitive conversation (see below).
From Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship improves Disciplinary learning in secondary and College Classrooms, Second Edition, by Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Lynn Murphy. Copyright 2012.