Archive for March, 2011

Common Core State Standards: Aligned with Reading Apprenticeship

March 25, 2011

I was recently asked “Does Reading Apprenticeship address the new Common Core State Standards?“

The answer is “Yes!” In fact, they cite our work multiple times in the Standards, especially in relation to the importance of providing students with supported instructional experiences with sufficiently complex texts to build their academic reading skills.

What are the Common Core State Standards?

The Common Core State Standards clearly define the knowledge and skills students should obtain during their K-12 education so that they graduate from high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs. For the first time, emphasis is placed on meeting literacy standards in each of the core academic disciplines.

The Common Core State Standard (CCSS)

  • are aligned with college and work expectations;
  • ensure consistent expectations regardless of a student’s zip code;
  • provide educators, parents, and students with clear, focused guideposts;
  • include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills;
  • emphasize literacy across all core academic disciplines;
  • build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards;
  • are internationally benchmarked, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and
  • are based on evidence and research.

The development of the standards was coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and other experts. The federal government was not involved in the development of these standards and individual states choose whether or not to adopt them. To date 48 states, the District of Columbia, and two territories have signed on to the CCSS Initiative.

How do the Common Core State Standards Align with Reading Apprenticeship?

Compare this excerpt from the Common Core State Standards with the description of Reading Apprenticeship that follows. People who know Reading Apprenticeship will not be surprised by the close alignment.  (more…)

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Posted in Adolescent Literacy, Common Core Standards, Disciplinary Reading, English Language Arts, Literacy, Professional Development, Reading Apprenticeship, Reading Comprehension, Standards, Strategic Literacy Initiative, Teacher Professional Development | Leave a Comment »

Report from Winter Conference: Reading Apprenticeship for Students with a Range of Needs

March 17, 2011

The Reading Apprenticeship Winter Conference was held earlier this month near Philadelphia with 70 participants attending from 9 states.  I was honored to facilitate a problem-solving roundtable at the conference.  We tackled the issue of how to meet the needs of students with special learning needs within the Reading Apprenticeship framework. Our insights fell into two categories: classroom implementation and professional development connections.

Classroom Implementation

Our roundtable discussion was especially focused on the importance for students with special learning needs of classroom relationships, brain-considerate teaching, and pumped-up background knowledge:

  • Know Your Students: This goes beyond reading levels and past performance. What are their interests and hobbies? What makes them tick?
  • Build Relationships: Knowing students goes a long way toward building relationships. The consensus in our group was that teachers who have not developed relationships with their students will struggle with Reading Apprenticeship implementation; students have to feel safety and trust.
  • Don’t Double Dip: Brain research tells us our brain focuses on one thing at a time. Therefore, do not teach new content and new learning processes at the same time. Teach new content with familiar structures and new learning processes with familiar content.
  • Teach Expectations: My colleagues connected back to the “Rita Classroom Case” from their initial Reading Apprenticeship training and how Rita explicitly teaches key learning routines for six weeks before digging deeply into content.
  • Scaffold Background Knowledge: Build on and build up student strengths. Learning goals stay constant, but purposefully build in a variety of opportunities to build student background knowledge.
  • Go Visual: Visual images can be processed almost instantly. They contribute background knowledge in a safe, risk-free manner and build student confidence. Many schools have visual resources such as streaming video that can support subject area reading.

Professional Development Connections

In our roundtable discussion, the focus on classroom implementation gave rise to a discussion on implications for professional development. How can we facilitate teacher confidence and efficacy to meet student needs? One striking suggestion resulted:

  • Plan Your Own Problem-Solving Roundtables: Our opportunity to exchange ideas and collaborate led to new insights and seeds of solutions. We benefited from hearing the stories, experiences, and stumbling blocks of others. Overall, the conversations were both reflective and encouraging. Why not take the roundtable experience home, we thought?

Holding your own roundtable need not be a huge undertaking. In a short period of time, perhaps as little as 20 minutes, participants can feel the power of the Reading Apprenticeship framework: build on the social and personal dimensions to develop your knowledge and skills. Give yourselves the gift of time to dialogue and problem-solve with colleagues.

Make time to dialogue and problem-solve with your colleagues.

Kelly Pauling

Kelly Pauling

Blog Contributor Kelly Pauling

Kelly Pauling is Director of Curriculum Services at Colonial Intermediate Unit 20 (CIU20), and coordinates Reading Apprenticeship’s i3 grant in Pennsylvania. Previously she worked as a staff developer, curriculum specialist, and teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing. She first attended Reading Apprenticeship training in 2003 and was immediately captivated by the RA framework. She has worked diligently to build RA capacity throughout her area. Current passions, in addition to Reading Apprenticeship, include integrating technology in education, school improvement, and chocolate.

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Posted in Adolescent Literacy, Collaboration, English Language Learners (ELL), Literacy, Professional Development, Reading Apprenticeship, Teacher Professional Development | 1 Comment »

Is It a Good Idea to Pre-teach Vocabulary?

March 11, 2011

The more words in a text that students know, the better they will understand the text. So what does this mean for pre-teaching vocabulary?

The teachers’ goal of pre-teaching vocabulary is usually to limit the challenge of dealing with new words so that students can focus on the academic content of the text. Even though this may seem considerate in terms of students’ content learning, it may be inconsiderate on another count. Pre-teaching vocabulary may keep students from developing the skills they need to deal with new words in any text.

Reading Apprenticeship advocates a student-centered, inquiry approach for identifying and learning new words. In this approach, students learn to value word learning and are introduced to a range of skills for dealing with new words. These include:

  • how to notice new words while reading,
  • how to evaluate whether they are essential to understand (or not),
  • how to use word attack skills, strategies for using context clues, and strategies for using reference and other resources (like classmates) to learn new words.

In addition, previewing texts, noticing and using text structures and features, and spending time with illustrations and captions can build a knowledge framework, or schema, to support the learning of new concepts and vocabulary words.

In Reading Apprenticeship classrooms, teachers model how to deal with new words. Thinking aloud, talking to the text, identifying survival words, being a sentence detective, and using metacognitive logs are all high-utility strategies for helping students become flexible and independent word learners. Because students in Reading Apprenticeship classrooms often work collaboratively, they also share their strategies for dealing with new words and learn from each other.

The Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework is designed to help students deal with the realistic challenges of reading, not preempt reading challenges. That said, is there a role for pre-teaching vocabulary in Reading Apprenticeship?

A teacher might reasonably choose to pre-teach vocabulary when a text poses substantial comprehension challenges in addition to containing many new words. In this case the teacher would strategically pre-teach only the very few words that are both essential for comprehension and impossible to understand from the context, then follow up by orchestrating multiple instances for students to speak, hear, read, and write the words in meaningful contexts.

Making decisions about which words to teach can be a difficult judgment call. Teachers who engage students in helping to identify “survival words” for a text (see pages 106–107, Reading for Understanding) tell us they are surprised how often they make wrong guesses about the words their students don’t know and may need their help in defining. In most textbooks, many essential content words are already identified and defined for students, so the teacher’s role is to orchestrate ways for students to use and appropriate these new words. This means text-based discussion plays a key role in students’ vocabulary growth.

The key to helping students increase their word knowledge is not just to teach them the words, but to make sure they have the strategies that will allow them to teach themselves, and use, the unknown words they encounter whenever they read.

Blog Contributor, Will Brown

Will Brown

Will Brown is a Professional Development Associate with the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd. He specializes in supporting science and math teachers who are integrating Reading Apprenticeship into their courses. Before joining SLI, Will taught science in the Oakland Unified School District, where he and his students got quite comfortable thinking aloud, talking to the text, keeping metacognitive logs, and working collaboratively (check out a video snippet of Will and the students in his Introduction to Chemistry class). Will received a PhD in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley.

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Posted in Reading Apprenticeship, English Language Arts, Literacy, Adolescent Literacy, Teacher Resources, Disciplinary Reading, Collaboration, Reading Comprehension | Leave a Comment »

Herding Elephants?

March 4, 2011

Whenever I facilitate Reading Apprenticeship professional development or talk to somebody about bringing Reading Apprenticeship to their campus, I am asked the same question: “How do we convince our colleagues to come to our workshop and to try this in their classes? How do we create buy-in across the disciplines?”

How, indeed!  How do you engage any overwhelmed instructor in the enormous project of examining and modifying his or her pedagogical approaches? A psychology professor described his move from a lecture style of instruction to a Reading Apprenticeship style of instruction as “burning down a beautiful house that I had built by hand and that I enjoyed living in, and moving into a walk-up apartment.” Ouch! So how exactly do we sell this process to colleagues?

Elephant and rider drawing

by Jana Bouc

In Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath describe a framework for supporting change that begins with psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s insight that human beings are analogous to an elephant with a rider.

The “Rider” is our rational, analytical side — the person holding the reins who knows you absolutely should not eat that chocolate cheesecake. The “Elephant” is our emotional side, the part that says, “I deserve cheesecake!  I’ve had a really rough week. Besides, studies show that chocolate is good for you.” If the Rider and the Elephant disagree, the six-ton Elephant wins — no contest.

Heath and Heath propose, then, that to support change, you’ve got to work with both the Rider and the Elephant. Direct the Rider by explaining what you are doing, why you are doing it, and where it will take you. Motivate the Elephant by creating emotional engagement, making change feel manageable, and creating a sense of community around it. Finally, Heath and Heath suggest shaping the path the Rider and Elephant will travel by tweaking any institutional/environmental structures that could better support the change.

All of us in the community colleges have to cope with massive change right now, and most people who are starting to introduce Reading Apprenticeship professional development to their campuses want to know how colleagues in other contexts have managed to shape those changes without being trampled by a herd of angry elephants.

For example, I wonder how the faculty at Renton Technical College made so much progress so fast?  Could it be because their RATS [Reading Apprenticeship Teachers and Supporters] Review publication “rallies the herd?” In truth, we need to know not just what has worked, but why it did in order to adapt different strategies to our unique situations.

Stay tuned for posts showcasing successful Reading Apprenticeship implementation models from around the country — but in the meantime, think about it. What could you do on your campus to direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the path for Reading Apprenticeship-oriented change?

Blog Contributor, Nika Hogan

Nika Hogan

Nika Hogan

Nika Hogan is Associate Professor of English at Pasadena City College (PCC) and the Reading Apprenticeship Community College Coordinator for the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd (SLI).  She has a B.A. in English and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Multiethnic U.S. Literatures from the University of Massachusetts.

Her work at PCC and with Reading Apprenticeship is focused on developing pedagogical, curricular, and institutional approaches and structures that will maximize the retention and success of all students, especially those entering college at the “basic skills” level.  She has been involved in many learning communities through PCC’s Teaching and Learning Center and is currently the Activities Director of a Title V grant designed to scale up those programs to a broad first-year experience pathway that will, if she gets her way, integrate both reading across the curriculum and reading across the community.  She lives in Altadena, CA,  with her partner, their three-year-old son, and two extremely under-disciplined terriers.

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Posted in Community College Literacy, Disciplinary Reading, Literacy, Professional Development, Reading Apprenticeship, Strategic Literacy Initiative, Teacher Professional Development | Leave a Comment »

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