Strengthening Students’ Literacy and Learning through Reading Apprenticeship®

World History Summer Institute

http://ra.3csn.org

Chapter 2 Reading For Understanding

Dimensions of Reading Apprenticeship

Creating a community of learners

• Think of a time when you were in a learning situation in community that went very well for you. What would it take to make today’s workshop that kind of successful learning environment for you?

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Personal Reading History

“ When students reflect on and share their personal reading histories, they have an opportunity to view themselves and their classmates more generously, as ‘readers in progress,’ with reader identities they can understand and change”

(Schoenbach, Greenleaf and Murphy 79).

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Write about some key moments or events in your development as a reader in your

discipline.

• What experiences stand out for you? High points? Low points?

• Were there times when your reading experience or the materials you were reading made you feel like an insider? Like an outsider?

• What supported your literacy development in this subject area? What discouraged it?

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Personal Reading History

• Share some highlights of your reading history with a partner. Make sure that each of you has had an opportunity to read or tell your story uninterrupted before you respond to what you’ve heard.

• Once both people have had a chance to share, discuss what you’ve learned about each other: what were some commonalities? What were some surprises?

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Personal Reading History

• What did you learn about yourself as a reader? About your partner?

• What supported your reading development?

• What discouraged it?• What are some commonalities? Surprises?

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Classroom Application

• What are some possible benefits and/or drawbacks of doing a Personal Reading History with your students?

• How might you modify this Personal Reading History activity to fit your classroom?

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Primary Sources in World History

Professor John Allen

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Reading Apprenticeship

• A partnership of expertise between the teacher and students, drawing on what content area teachers know and do as skilled discipline-based readers and on learners’ unique and often underestimated strengths

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WestEd’sStrategic Literacy Initiative (SLI)

• A professional development and research organization focusing on improving academic literacy in diverse populations of adolescents and post-secondary students using Reading Apprenticeship, a research-based instructional framework.

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Dimensions of Reading Apprenticeship

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Reading Apprenticeship

Professional Development

activities mirror classroom application

Capturing your Reading Process

• Thinking about your thinking while reading• Engages students and teachers in a

metacognitive conversation about how we read• Key professional development and

classroom strategy

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Capturing your Reading Process

• Read the text silently as you normally would when you want to understand something. (Marx, Capital)

• You’ll have about five minutes to read, and we’ll do a short writing piece afterward.

• Please reread if you finish early.

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Capturing your Reading Process

• What strategies did you use to make sense of the text?

• What got in the way of your reading?• What, if any, comprehension problems did

you solve?• Which, if any, problems still remain?

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Small group discussion: opening a window into our thinking

• What did I do?• Where did I do it?• How did that affect my reading

and understanding?

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Reading Strategies List

• A living document that helps the class engage in metacognitive conversations about what we do to problem solve as we read.

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Reflect Reading Process Analysis

• What did you notice about your or someone else’s reading that is new or surprising?

• What are some of the benefits and challenges of doing RPA with your students?

• What modifications would you make?• How can you begin a metacognitive conversation

with students about their own literacy experiences?

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Think Aloud

A direct route into metacognitive conversation

Case Study Assignment

• Study of WWII Japanese internment

• U.S. Constitution• Supreme Court Decision on

Korematsu

Think Aloud

• Helps students to notice and say when they are confused, and use each other as resources for making meaning

• Helps you to practice making your thinking visible, so you can model effective ways of reading texts in your discipline for students

• Helps to give names to the cognitive strategies that we use to comprehend text

• Helps to notice text structures and how we navigate various genres to build confidence, range, and stamina

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Think Aloud

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Pairs Try Think Aloud

• As one person reads and thinks aloud, the partner annotates on the text

• After each chunk, discuss the meaning and agree on a summary sentence

• Then switch roles thinking aloud and annotating the text.

Reflect on Think Aloud

• What did you notice about your own or your partner’s thinking and reading?

• What did you notice about the demands of this text?

• What do you have to know in order to make sense of this text?

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Problem Solving made Visible

Through Think Aloud, we begin to problem-solve using cognitive strategies that we name and talk explicitly about—routinemetacognitive conversations.

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Schema Demands

• What is challenging about this text?• What do we have to draw upon in order to

make sense of it?• What did you notice about the difference

between reading alone and reading with a partner?

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Classroom Case Inquiry

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• Observe how one teacher supports disciplinary, rigorous thinking and reading in her class

• Inquire how Reading Apprenticeship can be embedded into a content class

• We won’t be evaluating the lesson or coaching the teacher

Read the Context• Scan the subheadings and find

one section you want to read carefully

• Look at the lesson at a glance”

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Observations?•What do you notice about

the way Gayle organizes her class and her long-term goals?

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Evidence/Interpretation

Observations must be grounded in

Evidence!

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Viewing Focus• 1’s: What do you notice about the

students’ reading and talk about reading?

• 2’s What do you notice about the supports for students’ talking and reading?

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Pair Share• Keep your discussion based on the

evidence of what you saw students and teacher doing

• Focus on the disciplinary ways of thinking (historical) the students are learning to practice

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Whole Group Reflection

• What does the teacher say?• What can you take-away from this inquiry?• How can you apply what you learned in

your classroom?

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Talking to the Text

This strategy is basically a think aloud on paper. It differs from think aloud in two key ways:

• the individual reflection on the reading process is written, not spoken

• the metacognitive conversation is delayed until after the individual reading and reflecting

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Talk to the Text with Snow Falling on Cedars

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Individual Practice

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Pair Discussion

• What were did you do as you read?• What reading strategies did you

use?• What schema (knowledge) did you

bring to the text?

Group Share

• What did you notice about your partner’s thinking?

• Did you learn something you would not have thought of on your own?

• What similarities and differences did you notice between you and your partner?

• What kind of knowledge did you or your partner bring to the text?

Reflect on Talking to the Text

• How did it feel to Talk to the Text?• What similarities and differences did you

notice about Thinking Aloud and Talking to the Text?

• What might be some of the benefits and burdens of engaging students in Talking to the Text in your own classes?

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World History Institute

Tuesday

Metacognitive Logs

“Metacognitive logs can help students become more aware of their thinking as readers and give them more control over how well they learn. The logs can be a place for students to document their reading experiences in preparation for sharing and problem solving in the whole class community”

Think like a Historian

ContextWho/Where/When

EvidenceImportant ideas and information in the text

Interpretation/AnalysisThis means that…This reminds me of…This connects to…

Toussaint Louverture

•Take a few minutes to read the text and use the note taker

Share your notes in groups

• Notice similarities and differences• What are of the benefits and

burdens of using these note takers• What modifications might you

make?

Whole Group Share Out

• What similarities and differences did you notice in your note taking?

• Benefits and burdens?• How might you use this technique in your

classroom?• How can you use this activity to foster a

metacognitive conversation with students?

Try it out !• As you listen to the content

talks today, experiment with the Metacognitive Reading Logs in your packets

Schema: focusing on knowledge building

What is Schema?

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Quick Illustration of Schema

Do you have a

reservation?

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The building blocks of meaning making

• When students connect to past learning, they are able to build new knowledge

• Surfacing what we need to know in order to make sense of a text can help us lead our students to independent learning

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Surface Schema with “Hocked Gems”

• Read “Hocked Gems” silently and Talk to the Text, paying special attention to what you know and how you think you know it.

• If you think you understand it, please DO NOT give away the answer!

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• What do you know that helped you make sense of the text and what in the text sparked you to think of it?

• How did you learn that?

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Four Areas of Knowledge

• World/ Personal: Schema from your lived day to day experience

• Text: Schema about how different text forms and genres are structured

• Discipline: Schema learned as a result of school; specialized knowledge

• Language: Schema about how words are built and fit with other words

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Reflect on Schema

• How can we activate students’ existing schema?

• How can we make our schema available to them?

• What schema do students need to engage with YOUR course text(s)?

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Corandic is an emurient grof with many fribs; it granks from corite, an olg which cargs like lange. Corite grinkles several other tarances, which garkers excarp by glarcking the corite and starping it in tranker-clarped storbs. The tarances starp a chark which is exparged with worters, branking a slorp. This slorp is garped through several other corusces, finally frasting a, pragety, blickant crankle: coranda. Coranda is a cargurt, grinkling corandic and borigen. The corandic is nacerated from the borigen by means of loracity. Thus garkers finally thrap a glick, bracht, glupous grapanrt, corandic, which granks in many starps.

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1. What is corandic?2.What does corandic grank from?3. How do garkers excarp the tarances

from the corite?4.What is coranda?5. How is the corandic nacerated from

the borigen?6. What do the garkers finally thrap?

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Text and Task Analysis

• We want you to be able to apply all of this in a practical way, to see how RA might influence your lesson planning.

• If you happen to have a current course text with you, pull it out. Otherwise, choose one of the texts in your packet.

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Find a partner and choose a text to

analyze, preferably a text you want to teach

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Think Aloud (6 min)

• One partner Thinks Aloud while the other partner takes notes.

• Switch rolls after 3 minutes .• Afterwards, you will discuss the kinds of

schema the readers drew upon and the kinds of reading strategies s/he employed.

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Discuss and Analyze• Use the Text and Task Analysis

note taker in binder• What kind schema is needed for

understanding?• What teaching strategies might you

use to facilitate understanding?

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Group Share

• What Ah-ha’s did you experience?• Roadblocks?• How can you plan to build on what students

already know? • How can you scaffold what they don’t

know and need to know?

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Reflection on Schema• Students need to connect new knowledge to

existing knowledge• Build on Strengths: Helping students

understand (surface) what they already know can be a big confidence builder

• It’s important to begin with accessible texts so students can practice what they know and think about how they know it

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For Tomorrow• Bring a text you will teach in the fall• You may work with others if you wish!• Bring any materials you will need to begin

planning a lesson or unitoLaptopoTemplates (if you use them)oText sets/text books

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Wednesday

•Course Planning with Reading Apprenticeship

•Wrap up

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Our Goals with Reading Apprenticeship:

• Help students learn to read and think like insiders (experts) in a subject area

• Overcome our own expert blind spot – blending subject-area knowledge with important understandings of how novices acquire the conventions, rituals, and expectations of discourse in that field

More Goals

• Help students gain insight into their own reading processes

• Help students develop a repertoire of problem solving strategies for overcoming obstacles and deepening comprehension of texts from various academic disciplines

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In Reading Apprenticeship Classrooms, Teachers

• Focus on comprehension and metacognitive conversation

• Create a climate of collaboration

• Provide appropriate support while emphasizing student independence

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In a Reading Apprenticeship Classroom, one will notice:

• The teacher briefly modeling to make his or her thinking visible

• The students engaging in guided practice of what the teacher has modeled

• Students talking with one another about their experiences with the reading

Reflect Make some notes about how our activities

have addressed the “dimensions of Reading Apprenticeship” over the last two days (see pg 1) .

Social, Personal, Cognitive, Knowledge Building, Metacognitive

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Small Groups discussion

• How might these activities work (or not) in your classroom?

• How might you change the activities?

Whole Group Share

• What routines did we experiment with and where do they fit in the framework?

• What can we do in our classrooms? What seems most important and how can you bring that to your students?

Classroom Planning

• Work alone or with others to plan a lesson or unit.

• Use a text, or texts that you plan to teach in the fall

Want to know more about RA?– Reading for Understanding by Schoenbach et al

(Amazon)– August 7-9 in Oakland: 3 day workshop for

secondary teachers of all subjects– You can arrange for workshops at your campus

Contact: Kate Meissert: kmeisse@wested.orgStrategic Literacy Initiative, WestEd

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I welcome your feedback!

Shawn Frederking (sfrederk@yccd.edu)English Instructor/ Instructional Associate: Language

Arts, Yuba CollegeCommunity College Reading Apprenticeship

Consultant, Strategic Literacy Initiative, WestEd

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RA helps to develop more powerful readers

• Engaging students in more reading– for recreation, subject-area learning, and self-challenge

• Making the teacher’s discipline-based reading processes visible to the students;

• Making students’ reading processes, motivations, strategies, knowledge, and understanding visible to the teacher and to one another;

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