RAISE+Documents

=What is Reading Apprenticeship?=

When secondary and college students don't read with understanding, or avoid reading academic texts altogether, what can help?

Reading Apprenticeship draws on teachers' untapped expertise as discipline–based readers and on students' untapped strengths as learners.

The result is a research–based, research–tested partnership that benefits students and teachers alike.

Randomized controlled studies have shown that with Reading Apprenticeship:


 * Teachers increase the effectiveness of their disciplinary teaching.
 * Students build both reading and subject area competence.
 * Students gain the dispositions to engage, problem solve, and persevere when faced with challenging academic texts.

=**Reading Apprenticeship Framework:**=

Reading Apprenticeship instructional routines and approaches are based on a framework that describes classroom life in terms of four interacting dimensions that support reading development:


 * **Social:** The social dimension draws on students' interests in peer interaction as well as larger social, political, economic, and cultural issues. Reading Apprenticeship creates a safe environment for students to share their confusion and difficulties with texts, and to recognize their diverse perspectives and knowledge.
 * **Personal:** This dimension draws on strategic skills used by students in out–of–school settings, their interest in exploring new aspects of their own identities and self–awareness as readers, their purposes for reading, and their goals for reading improvement.
 * **Cognitive:** The cognitive dimension develops readers' mental processes, including their repertoire of specific comprehension and problem–solving strategies. The work of generating cognitive strategies that support reading comprehension is carried out through shared classroom inquiry.
 * **Knowledge–Building:** This dimension includes identifying and expanding the knowledge readers bring to a text and further developing it through personal and social interaction with that text. Students build knowledge about language and word construction, genre and text structure, and the discourse practices specific to a discipline — in addition to the concepts and content embedded in the text.

These dimensions are woven into subject area teaching through "metacognitive conversations" — conversations about the thinking processes students and teachers engage in as they read. "Extensive reading" — increased opportunities for students to practice reading in more skillful ways — is the necessary context for this framework to succeed.

Ruth Schoenbach and Cynthia Greenleaf, Co-Directors of the Strategic Literacy Initiative, direct the RAISE project

Planning Template for Reading Apprenticeship Classroom:



 * // The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently //**

**Teacher Talk Stems and Metacognitive Questions**

=** Meeting Protocols, Norms and Graphic Organizers: **=