Reading Apprenticeship

From time to time, teachers in our professional development institutes will ask, “What about writing? How does Reading Apprenticeship address students’ needs to develop as writers?”

Two very important types of writing come immediately to mind. The first we might call “writing to learn.” In Reading Apprenticeship classrooms, students are routinely asked to annotate texts with their thinking, write metacognitive reflections, develop and use graphic organizers to gather and organize their thoughts while reading, and use journals and logs to promote and document their learning. They assess their own progress in reading and learning in a variety of forms, including reflective letters to their teachers. Frequent opportunities to put mind to text while putting pen to paper build students’ fluency of written expression.

The second type is the writing of formal essays, explanations, and arguments that are more often considered the target of writing instruction. In the Reading Apprenticeship Academic Literacy curriculum for ninth grade, extended thematic units of study involving multiple genres lead to a formal essay that draws on that extensive reading. These units demonstrate an “apprenticeship approach” to writing instruction that will be familiar to anyone practicing Reading Apprenticeship. In brief:

• Writing is a purposeful activity in which teachers apprentice and guide their students to greater mastery.
• The class identifies, examines, and discusses features of texts that demonstrate valued communication strategies using model or mentor texts.
• Teachers model writing processes such as brainstorming ideas, drawing information from previous readings on key themes, planning the presentation/flow/structure of ideas through the essay, revising, and editing — all while thinking aloud during the composing process [a closer parallel to thinking aloud during the comprehension process would be hard to find].
• Student talk — discussion of reading materials, ideas about how they connect to unit themes, and plans for writing about texts — pervades the learning environment.
• Students work collaboratively to compose together, with teacher support, before going at an essay-writing task independently.
• With the whole writing process and product in view, students are given frequent and multiple opportunities to try their hand at parts of the process and parts of the product, with teacher and peer support.
• Teachers scaffold the writing itself with structural supports, or writing frames, as well as transition words and sentence frames, particularly for English learners needing additional support for expressing their ideas in English.
• Students are given real audiences for their written work and publication venues for sharing their writing with a broader world of thinkers, readers, writers, and decision makers.
• The mentoring, guidance, collaboration, and scaffolds fade over time as students move toward independence as writers.

Early in our history we were deeply influenced by the work of the National Writing Project and its promotion of teachers experiencing their own writing processes to build expertise as teachers of writing. Apprenticeship begins with teachers’ analysis of their own processes of composing meaning, whether while reading or while writing. Metacognitive routines (think aloud, talking to the text, ongoing metacognitive conversation) can serve important roles throughout the writing process as teachers model valued reasoning and decision-making processes while composing, promote student discussion of their varied writing problems and problem-solving approaches, and engage students in responding to one another’s ideas and drafts.

The beautiful thing about routine strategic apprenticeships in writing (and reading) is that once established, this instruction can focus on discipline-specific communicative purposes and forms of text, including description, explanation, and argumentation. As Susan De La Paz and Mark Felton wrote recently,

Support for writing [in history] may help students learn to read multiple source documents with the purpose of identifying and reconciling conflicting points of view. Conversely, support for reading historical documents may help students to develop more sophisticated claims, evidence, and counterarguments in their writing […. R]esearch in writing, at least in disciplines other than language arts, has largely overlooked this intimate relationship between reading and writing processes (175).”*

There is ample support in the research literature for this kind of apprenticeship approach to writing. Look no further than the recent monograph Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading by Steve Graham and Michael Hebert, published in 2010 as a Carnegie Corporation Time to Act Report available for download.

And in the recently completed Writing Intensive Reading Comprehension (WIRC) Study, Jim Collins and his colleagues demonstrated that assisted writing about reading improved fourth and fifth grade students’ reading comprehension. At the recent International Reading Association conference in Orlando, Collins observed that although writing was often seen as an instrument of testing in our schools and classrooms, it was not often used as an instrument of learning. He asked,

If we test kids by having them write about their reading, why don’t we teach kids by having them write about their reading?” [italics added]

*S. De La Paz, and M. K. Felton, “Reading and Writing from Multiple Source Documents in History: Effects of Strategy Instruction with Low to Average High School Writers.” Contemporary Educational Psychology 2010, 35:174–192.

Cynthia Greenleaf

Blog Contributor, Cynthia Greenleaf

Cynthia Greenleaf co-directs WestEd’s Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) and SLI’s research program and has contributed to several books on literacy and education. She received a PhD and MA in language and literacy education from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in linguistics from the University of California, San Diego, where she graduated magna cum laude.