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Practical Advice on Reading Across the Curriculum

By Bracken Reed

In an era of high-stakes testing and drill-based reading instruction, it can sometimes seem that reading has become a dull affair for students and teachers alike. Add to the mix the pressure of delivering complex, subject-area content at the secondary level and the idea of reading as an engaging and even absorbing activity recedes further into the distance. By middle school, many students have acquired an attitude toward reading that is on the level of an eat-your-vegetables, do-your-chores kind of drudgery. They will do so only when forced.

And they're not alone. Many subject-area teachers meet the idea of incorporating reading instruction into their lesson plans with an equally begrudging attitude: they don't have the time, they don't have the training, and besides, it's not their problem.

The Reading Apprenticeship program offers an exciting option for bringing these reluctant souls back into the fold: an inquiry-based instructional model that is dynamic, collaborative, and profoundly empowering for all involved. That it can help struggling adolescent readers while simultaneously delivering challenging content to all can make it seem too good to be true. That it can be fun is a revelation.

The Reading Apprenticeship framework is part of the larger Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) developed by the San Francisco, California-based organization WestEd. Since its inception in 1995, SLI has grown from its original collaboration with teams of teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area to achieve national recognition and growing popularity.

One testament to that popularity was the Integrating Literacy into Secondary School Content Areas Conference that took place at Western Oregon University last spring. Dr. Jane Braunger, a Senior Research Associate at WestEd and a pivotal member of the SLI team, was the main presenter at the conference, which was attended by high-level members of the Oregon Department of Education, including Superintendent Susan Castillo. SLI and the Reading Awareness framework are clearly gaining the attention of public educators throughout the Northwest and beyond. So, what's the attraction?

First, in opposition to the current trend of teaching basic decoding skills to struggling adolescent readers, Reading Apprenticeship focuses on comprehension. It's an integrated, inquiry-based approach that gives teachers the power to teach—in the true sense of being mentors, motivators, experts, and collaborators—while providing students with the guidance and skills to take charge of their own learning. As Braunger, who is also the current director of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Commission on Reading, said at the conference, "The Strategic Learning Initiative is about empowerment. It's about giving struggling readers access to the high school curriculum and hopes for a college education. It's not about reteaching phonics to 16-year-olds."

Second, as the name implies, one of the most striking features of Reading Apprenticeship is its focus on a collaborative mentor/apprentice relationship between teacher and student. Picture an old-fashioned master carpenter/carpenter's apprentice type of interaction and you'll be headed in the right direction.

In Reading Apprenticeship teachers reveal the strategies, skills, and background knowledge they draw on to make sense of a given text, in much the same way a craftsperson might reveal the secrets of her trade—by explicitly modeling those strategies and skills for students while collaborating with them to solve real-world problems. It's on-the-job training. The teacher guides the process and everyone contributes to the comprehension of the text.

In Reading Apprenticeship, students learn how to closely examine both their own strategies of comprehension and those of their instructor and fellow students. They learn to recognize the strategies they've already been using and to develop new ones in a way that is practical and hands-on.

This process of collaborative "metacognition," or thinking about how we think, is fundamental to the program and can be a powerful experience for students who have never been exposed to it. By seeing, explicitly, how their teacher and their fellow students make sense of a given text, students begin to understand the powerful tools that are at their disposal. As they summarize, make predictions, ask specific questions, restate difficult passages in their own words, outline, highlight, and draw on their own knowledge base, they gain confidence in their ability to understand complex, academic subject matter.

A third reason for the program's growing popularity is its flexibility. Its collaborative process and its focus on comprehension make the program ideally suited to teaching reading across the curriculum. Teachers and students can use the method to comprehend a John Steinbeck novel, an algebra textbook, the directions for a science experiment, or the U.S. Constitution.

While students learn that certain strategies work better with certain kinds of texts, they also gain the knowledge that all reading materials, no matter what the subject matter, can be comprehended using an appropriate set of skills.

The inherent respect for teachers and students that is built into Reading Apprenticeship may be the most fundamental reason for its growing popularity. And with that respect comes responsibility.

"We need to increase the sense of teacher responsibility for addressing literacy in subject areas," says Braunger. "Teaching reading in a content area is teaching the content area. It's not an add-on."

At the same time, she says, "Students need to be struggling with difficult content. Too often students are not held accountable to do much reading in school, and they do very little reading outside of school—they see reading as only a school-based activity. They lack confidence and are mentally passive with academic reading, but they do have skills. They're just inexperienced in dealing with certain kinds of texts."

At a time when expectations seem to have been both lowered in ways that insult intelligence and raised in ways that have nothing to do with the actual process of learning, Reading Apprenticeship is a practical, hands-on approach to helping both students and teachers meet their innate potential.

It's no wonder the message is spreading.

To learn more about SLI and the Reading Apprenticeship program, visit their Web site at www.wested.org/stratlit/