Reading Apprenticeship

Although many faculty at our community college have heard of Reading Apprenticeship or attended our campus-wide training sessions, their teaching loads offer little time to ponder the complexity of reading instruction. They tend to assume their students have the reading skills needed to succeed — until they see poor test results, students drop out, or students ask many “obvious” questions.

When faculty recognize that students need help with reading, they are concerned first that they don’t have training in teaching reading and second that their primary professional obligation is to cover the content of their classes.

For me as a faculty mentor and trainer, these are the exact reasons why Reading Apprenticeship is an important, appropriate, and effective instructional framework to use.  After all, as faculty members, we are the content “reading” experts. Who is better at revealing the secrets in the passages of our class texts?

When faculty ask me for assistance, I think it is critical to use actual coursework texts, so I request a desk copy of their primary text. I select several Reading Apprenticeship routines that fit the content and text and are likely matches for their teaching style, and then I schedule a visit to their classrooms.

I engage the students in a discussion about the value of reading in their course, introduce the four dimensions of the Reading Apprenticeship Framework, have the students do a personal reading history exercise, and then model a Reading Apprenticeship routine such as the Reading Strategies List or a Think Aloud about the organization of the text. Follow-up sessions have covered text features, the pairing of text passages and chapter graphics, vocabulary exercises, evidence/interpretation metacognitive logs, more Think Alouds, text annotation, and inquiry as a means for engaging the text.

In my next post I will share some of the feedback from students and faculty, including some interesting ideas about who benefits from student-centered classrooms.

Click here to read Part 2 of Planting the Seeds of Reading Apprenticeship.

Blog Contributor, Michele Lesmeister

Michele Lesmeister teaches Adult Education classes at Renton Technical College in Renton, Washington. She has a BA in Linguistics and a Master’s degree in Teaching English. Since 1990, she has focused on teaching adults transferable language skills in writing and reading and sometimes math for health sciences. She has published two texts with Pearson Education: Math Basics for the Health Care Professional, 3rd edition and Writing Basics for the Health Care Professional. Michele began her work with Reading Apprenticeship by attending the a 2008 Leadership Institute in Reading Apprenticeship. She is leading a college-wide initiative of institutionalizing Reading Apprenticeship under the Achieving the Dream grant for her institution. You can learn more about the work in Reading Apprenticeship at Renton Technical College at www.RTC-Rats.org.