Leading for Literacy

A Reading Apprenticeship Approach

Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Lynn Murphy

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119321675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

Clear, on-the-ground guidance for Reading Apprenticeship implementation

Leading for Literacy provides tools and real-life examples to expand the benefits of a literacy approach that sparks students' engaged reading and thinking across disciplines, from middle school through community college. A companion to the landmark Reading for Understanding, this book guides teachers, leaders, and administrators through the nuts, bolts, benefits, and stumbling blocks of creating Reading Apprenticeship communities that extend a culture of literacy beyond individual classrooms.

This book explains how to generate authentic buy-in from teachers and administrators, use the Reading Apprenticeship Framework to turn reform overload into reform coherence, and create literacy teams, professional learning communities, and Reading Apprenticeship communities of practice that sustain an institutional focus on a student-centered, strengths-based culture of literacy.

Key insights from Reading Apprenticeship practitioners across the country address how to get started, build momentum, assess progress, and build partnerships and networks across schools, districts, campuses, and regions.

Persistently low levels of adolescent literacy continue to short-change students, contribute to discredited high school diplomas, and cause millions of students to drop out of high school and community college. Forty percent or more of community college students require remedial reading courses as college freshman. The researchers at WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative developed the Reading Apprenticeship Framework to provide educators with a proven path to improving literacy for all students, and this book provides clear guidance on bringing the framework to life.

• How to integrate Reading Apprenticeship with existing reform efforts
• How to use formative assessment to promote teacher and student growth
• How to coach and empower teachers
• How to cultivate literacy leadership
• How to provide long-term support for a strong content-literacy program

Nationwide classroom testing has shown Reading Apprenticeship to promote not only literacy and content knowledge, but also motivation and positive academic identity—leading to better student outcomes that reach beyond the classroom walls. Leading for Literacy lays out compelling ways to spread the benefits of Reading Apprenticeship, with practical guidance and real-world insight.

Chapter One
How to Start?

We want reading to be woven into the fabric of what is happening on our campus, to put reading into every conversation about student success, whether it is equity, first‐year experience, basic skills, even accreditation—and to connect those conversations and initiatives.

—Chris Padgett, American River College history instructor

DISCIPLINARY READING—the reading that middle school, high school, and college teachers assign day after day in class after class—is foundational to students' success. For anyone in doubt, new academic standards and workforce expectations make the demand for academic literacy emphatically clear. What is less clear is how to support students to achieve that literacy‐based, future‐oriented success.

For many if not most administrators, teachers, students, and parents, these new expectations may require a paradigm shift in understanding how learning happens best. This shift includes new ways of thinking about the relationship of literacy to subject area content, students' and teachers' roles in learning, and, most important, students' potential for critical thinking and disciplinary reasoning. Change of this depth cannot spread beyond a few classrooms and is not sustainable without system‐level support.

The Reading Apprenticeship Framework,¹ developed to promote students' engaged academic literacy, has a solid history of catalyzing this kind of transformative change—for individuals and within institutions.

Taking Up Transformational Change

Reading Apprenticeship makes a difference in the way people teach and the way kids learn, but it's not something you can say, “We're doing this tomorrow,” and have it be done tomorrow. It takes time and energy, and some patience and commitment from all parties involved.

—Randy Gawel, Berkley High School principal

To implement and scale up meaningful change in classrooms, teachers must deeply understand and own the goals and principles of such change. Many interventions focus on structural or cultural change in school climate or governance as the way to improve student outcomes. Other interventions focus on improving students' engagement and achievement by changing what happens in the classroom. Reading Apprenticeship is in this second category, with a focus on transforming classroom interactions between teachers and students, between students and their peers, and between students and texts of all types.

As an intervention with an explicit focus on changing classroom practice, Reading Apprenticeship takes a strengths‐based approach to how both teachers and students learn. Reading Apprenticeship first shows teachers how to make visible the “invisible” knowledge they already have of how to read with rich comprehension in their own content areas. This process then enables teachers to help students become aware of their own thinking processes, giving them confidence and skills to solve comprehension problems and to read more deeply.

To take the risks involved in trying out new ways of teaching, teachers need significant support from their schools and districts. Such support includes new structures, such as dedicated literacy teams and communities of practice, and more time to engage in high‐quality professional learning, professional collaboration, and problem solving with colleagues. These challenging professional activities also require political cover on the part of site and district administrators to protect teams and their time from challenges that may arise in the community or at higher levels in the system.

Successful education reform includes the awareness that each school, district, and college campus is particular and resists cookie‐cutter replication of even the most rigorously proven interventions. A context‐sensitive approach to Reading Apprenticeship implementation calls for a balance of flexibility and fidelity. Teachers and systems require the flexibility to make Reading Apprenticeship their own. At the same time, for interventions to be effective, integrity to the core principles is crucial. We have seen and heard about too many “toxic mutations” of Reading Apprenticeship not to urge educators to keep the key elements of Reading Apprenticeship—the Framework, an inquiry stance, and a strengths‐based approach—front and center. Without these core principles, implementation cannot achieve the powerful change that is required to improve learning for a large number of students.

In this chapter, we offer examples to suggest how educators in secondary schools and on college campuses can start to extend Reading Apprenticeship into the broader system in which they work. Familiar questions surface:

• How can teachers, convinced from their own experience of the effectiveness of Reading Apprenticeship, create opportunities for genuine buy‐in from other teachers and administrators?
• Are there ways administrators can initiate classroom change without the well‐known pitfalls of top‐down implementation?
• How can leadership teams turn external mandates into positive steps to meet their own goals for change?
• How can schools incorporate Reading Apprenticeship without adding to reform overload?

As we take up these questions, it is with the understanding that the avenues for introducing Reading Apprenticeship are different at the secondary and college levels. Each institutional structure creates different opportunities for instructional leadership and supports professional learning in parallel but different ways.

Leading Change at the Middle and High School Level

Reading Apprenticeship can't be seen as an extra program, it can't be seen as a one‐off. It has to be embedded into professional development and revisited.

—Janet Rummel, Chief Academic Officer for Goodwill Education Initiatives, Excel Centers²

Reading Apprenticeship sometimes spreads from one or two teachersat a middle or high school who have discovered Reading Apprenticeship on their own and are sharing it informally with colleagues. More commonly administrators concerned about students' academic literacy hear about Reading Apprenticeship through professional connections and make the decision to bring it to their faculty, often as an experiment for a few teachers to try but sometimes with top‐down expectations for wider implementation.

Whether the initial energy to address student literacy comes from teachers or administrators, for that energy to grow, others in the system need to see evidence that local classrooms are changing and students are benefiting. So, for example, teachers who have felt frustrated with their ability to support their students' disciplinary literacy but then experience success using Reading Apprenticeship approaches need opportunities to share with colleagues what they and their students are learning.

If schools already have professional learning structures in place, such as professional learning communities or department teams, these can be a base for bringing attention to disciplinary literacy and strengthening what it means to collaborate for the benefit of students. And if Reading Apprenticeship arrives at a school or district as more of an expectation than an invitation, increased support for teacher learning and shared administrative and faculty responsibility can create safe space for taking on the challenge of transforming educational practice.

Building Excitement from Teacher to Teacher

Secondary school administrators who have shepherded Reading Apprenticeship implementation cite teacher‐to‐teacher excitement as the bottom line for success. They find that the enthusiasm of teachers whose students are benefiting from Reading Apprenticeship is highly contagious.

When Randy Gawel was a relatively new principal at Berkley High School, he received an announcement that a team from his school could participate at no cost in a literacy professional development study.³ He asked two teachers for their opinions of the offer. The teachers were impressed, so he forwarded the announcement to the entire staff. Those two teachers and three others replied that they were interested in spending a week of their summer vacation learning about Reading Apprenticeship and getting ready to try it out in their classes.

Randy remembers the energy those five teachers brought to the beginning‐of‐the‐year staff meeting when he asked faculty members to describe what they were looking forward to: “Every one of those Reading Apprenticeship teachers independently said—and these were great teachers—‘I'm looking forward to implementing Reading Apprenticeship in my classroom, and it's going to change the way I teach, and it's going to change it for the better.’”

Over the following school year the five teachers worked as a team to implement Reading Apprenticeship in their own classes. They deliberately avoided trying to train staff. Instead, with the support of their principal, they shared with their colleagues what they were experiencing and what they were excited about.

At Chelsea High School, it was also the principal, Julie Deppner, now Chelsea district assis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Copyright Page
• List of Close-Ups
• List of Team-Tools
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: How to Start?
• Chapter 2: Partnering for Leadership
• Chapter 3: The Role of Inquiry in Reading Apprenticeship Professional Learning
• Chapter 4: Setting the Social and Personal Foundations for Inquiry
• Chapter 5: Exploring Reading as Colleagues
• Chapter 6: Exploring Instruction as Colleagues
• Chapter 7: Building Capacity, Momentum, and Sustainability
• Appendix A: Reading Apprenticeship Framework
• Appendix B: The Research Rationale for Inquiry‐Based Teacher Professional Development
• Appendix C: Assessment Tools
• Index
• End User License Agreement