Developing Schoolwide Reading Apprenticeship Programs

Schools can choose to offer a Reading apprenticeship course or simply incorporate reading strategies into each class.  It is best if all the staff is in cooperation or agreement of the apprenticeship program. 

According to Schoenbach (1999) there are things that all members of the school should be convinced of in order to make the program a success and these include:

-Problems with students' reading are mostly problems of reading comprehension and engagement.

-Reading comprehension can be improved through explicit instruction and practice in reading comprehension strategies in context of reading authentic texts.

-Reluctant adolescent readers can be (re-)engaged with reading through opportunities to read books of their own choosing, to become aware of their own reading preferences and processes, and to explore the role of their reading in society and their futures.

-It is the job of subject area teachers to help students to improve their ability to comprehend texts in their disciplines.

-Subject area teachers already know a great deal about reading in their disciplines and will be able - if they begin to surface their invisible knowledge about reading- to apprentice students as readers, helping them explore and expand their reading repertoire. (p. 170)

It is important to get administrative support, and work with colleagues to develop materials and curriculum plans.  When working on the reading apprenticeship program some essential questions to ask according to Schoenbach (1999) are, " What is reading?, What do proficient readers do when they read?, What are my characteristics as a reader?, What strategies do I use as I read?, What role does reading serve in people's personal and public lives?, What role will reading play in my future educational and career goals?, What goals can I set and work toward to help myself develop as a reader? (p. 181)

To sum up everything, students should learn to question, summarize, predict, and clarify.  When reading to learn students should survey their reading habits and attitudes, and keep a learning log. When students are Writing to learn students should reflect on ideas, and learn note taking strategies.   There are many ways a teacher can assess reading using a portfolio.  These include: Individual reading plans an goals, reflections, learning logs, written summaries, interview questions and summary, and reading survey. Schoenbach, 1999, pp. 182-186)

It is a good idea to learn to assess students both before during and after the implementation of the reading apprenticeship program.  This will help everyone know the benefits of the program and what successes it is having.  Surveys also help to know whether or not the beliefs and habits of the students have changed.  You can give the survey at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year.  You might also want to choose to give the survey in the middle of the year to see if you are making adequate progress in the attitudes and habits of students.  In the survey some good questions to ask according to (Schoenbach, 1999, p. 188) are:

1. If you had to guess, how many books would you say you owned?

2. How many books would you say are in your house?

3. How many novels would you say you've read in the last twelve months?

4. How did you learn to read?

5. Why do people read?

6. What does someone have to do in order to be a good reader?

7. Do you consider yoursef a good reader? Why or why not?

8. What kinds of books do you like to read?

9. How do you decide which books you'll read?

10. Have you ever reread a book? If so, can you name it/them here?

11. Do you ever read novels at home for pleasure? If so, how often do you read at home for pleasure?

12. Who are your favorite authors?

13. Do you like to have your teacher read to you? If so, is there anything special you'd like to hear?

14. In general, how do you feel about reading?

Professional Development: Creating Communities of Master Readers

In order to make the Reading Apprenticeship program successful according to Schoenbach (1999), "Teachers must become explicitly aware of how they tackle challenging text in general and text within their own disciplines in particular" (p. 151).  The average content area teacher does not think of herself or himself as a reading teacher however if the content area teacher starts to tune into her or his own reading habits, will change their thoughts on this.  Professional development should be inquiry based because learning how versus being told how makes a huge difference in the learning process and being able to teach what you have learned. 

Colleagues should explore the reading process together.  According to Schoenbach (1999), "Developing an explicit awareness of one's own reading process is more challenging and complex than one might expect.  Making one's own reading explicit involves focusing on complex mental processes that most teachers use unconsciously; it is sort of like trying to understand how one walks" (p. 153).  It is best to work with colleagues to become more aware of our own reading process.

There are four activities that this book recommends teachers do in order to analyze the reading process.  The first activity is called Capturing Reading Process.  In this activity use a short text no longer than 2 pages.  The teacher should read then share any problems they encounter and as they do this sort the problems into four categories.  Those categories are: fluency, motivation, cognition, and knowledge.  Another activity is called Think-Aloud Practice.  In this activity the teachers are working to comprehend.  They should work in pairs, and take turns thinking aloud about the text.  The next activity is called Close Reading.  In this activity teachers should journal as they think about their text and focus on how they know what they know about content.  The last activity is called Uncovering Disciplinary Ways of Reading.  In this activity teachers should tackle a difficult piece of reading and ask specific questions before, during, and after they read the text.  The before questions include: What expectations do you have about it?, What predictions do you have about what you will be reading?, What parts of this section of the text did you pay particular attention to? Why do you think you focused your attention on these parts?, and many more (Schoenbach, 1999, pp. 154-165).

Inquiry based professional development has a huge impact on the way we see and hear students, our own job, and reading as a whole.  "In our view, one of the most far-reaching results of reading apprenticeship is its power to change teacher-student relationships.  Appreciating the complexity of the reading process often changes teachers' perspectives about their students.  A deeper understanding of reading's inherent challenges, especially in discipline-specific texts, dispels the common assumption that students could be more successful readers 'if only they tried harder.'  Teachers who in the past may have identified certain students as lazy or unmotivated come to recognize that these students may simply need more explicit help in mastering the complex set of mental activities required to comprehend academic and other difficult text (Schoenbach, 1999, p. 166).

Overcoming Obstacles in Implementation

Although Reading Apprenticeship is a great way to help students learn to read, it is possible that there will be obstacles when teachers try to implement this program.  Individual needs of students can always present a challenge to teachers.  Schoenbach believes that ALL readers will benefit from the reading apprenticeship program.  Even the best readers will need to be prepared for new and unfamiliar text in college or their career.

Lower level readers should 95 percent of the time be reading at their reading level in order to build fluency in comprehension.  According to Schoenback (1999), "..some of the least-proficient readers may need activities in addition to SSR and extra support to develop into fluent readers.  In addition, a major obstacle to building fluency for poor adolescent readers is the stigma they feel when they can read only what they consider baby books with ease.  Reducing or eliminating this stigma is key to helping them.  The author recommends a book called Buddy Reading to help eliminate stigma for low readers.  This book is written by Katherine Samway, Gail Whang, and Mary Pippitt.

This book talked about how decoding is usually not the issue with older children and yet they continue to get held back for "decoding issues".  However, this chapter discusses that if decoding is still a problem the students may possibly have language or learning problems and a teacher should utilize the resources of the special education teacher or department.

Second language learners benefit from the reading apprenticeship program because it gives them strategies that help them to make sense of what they read.  According to Schoenbach, "ESL learners benefit not only from strategic reading instruction but also from extensive and broad reading.  Extensive reading on a particular topic builds background knowledge and specific vocabulary, including semantically related words" (p. 142).

"When subject area teachers think about embedding a reading apprenticeship approach in their classes they foresee a deep tension arising between the ever-present pressure to cover the curriculum and the goal of helping students become independent readers and learners.  But in our experience, when teachers make the commitment to help students in the beginning of the year establishing comprehension rituals that support students and lead to increased independent reading throughout the year, this initial investment does not necessarily displace content coverage." (Schoenbach, 1999, p. 144)  The teacher should balance this out depending on what works for him or her.

Extensive reading in a subject area is important because it helps build background knowledge.  A teacher will need to look for several types of text on the same topic in order to help.  SSR might be a great activity for the beginning of a class period to help with reading the text and connecting them to the curriculum.

Test pressures c an detour teachers from wanting to teach using the reading apprenticeship program, however they should consider the fact that test scores improve once reading habits and attitudes toward reading improve.  When students enjoy reading overall their test scores increase.

Embedding Apprenticeship Strategies in Subject Area Classrooms

According to Schoenbach (1999) the Reading Apprenticeship approach has been successful when, "In the process of integrating new approaches to teaching reading, these teachers came to understand that helping students become more independent, critical readers of subject area texts is not a diversion from real teaching. Rather it is essential to students' understanding of curriculum content. 

History teachers should not only ask their students, "What did you find out in your reading?" but also "How did you figure that out?" "How did you get that idea?" and "How did you reach that conclusion?" (Schoenbach, 1999, p. 118).  The history teacher mentioned in this book..."introduced the process of being metacognitive about reading by putting a text up on the overhead projector and then 'thinking on paper' as she read, making her own reading process visible to her students.  Thereafter, she had students think on paper as they read these back-ground materials-writing notes in the margins about what they were thinking, questioning, or not understanding. Afterward, students usually met in groups of four to share their reading processes and to clarify vocabulary, ideas, and responses to the text. In full class discussion the teacher then continued the think-aloud by having students question her about the reading" (p. 118). 

Helping students find reasons to read is extremely important.  Without a legitimate reason to read many students will fail to see the importance of reading and fail to learn to read and will struggle with reading to learn.  Many teachers have attempted literature circles and the teacher either likes them or doesn't.  This book recommends literature circles as a method of teaching reading and a clear example of how to set this up so that it doesn't drive the teacher crazy.

Making the reading process safe and visible is very important in guiding the understanding of students.  Most of the reading process is invisible so some students get lost because they need to see the process. According to Schoenbach (1999), " Many network participants working to develop reading apprenticeships with their students have found that teacher think-alouds serve two important purposes.  In addition to making teachers' formerly invisible reading processes visible to students, the think-alouds make it safe for students to take risks in the classroom community.  After all if the teacher - the master reader - is willing to reveal his or her own confusion about a text, a student who feels confused won't feel so alone.  More important, students will begin to see confusion is a natural state of being for all readers at various points in their reading experience" (p. 123).

In my classroom I never pretend to know everything.  I was fortunate to have a mentor teacher who taught me that I am only human, and there is no possible way for me to know it all, so with that said I learned to demonstrate the processes of thinking or figuring out what I don't know to my students.  The answer is never simply "I don't know.", but it is always "I don't know, lets figure it out."

Building Context, Text, and Disciplinary Knowledge

Every teacher knows that prior knowledge is essential in order for students to connect to the new information they are learning.  I learned a strategy in my ESL training called Realia.  This is an attempt for teachers to build background knowledge when it doesn't exist in order to give students a greater chance to succeed.  For example during my ESL summer institute my co teachers and I created an thematic unit about desserts.  We live in the dessert so some students have a pretty good idea about what a dessert is however, it gets cold here and we have mountains.  It is not the typical desert you think of when talking about deserts.  In order to bring Realia into the classroom you bring in all 5 senses.   The students need to see, hear, taste, touch and smell.  We created 3D models that looked like a desert, they had animals that would live in a desert as well as plants, and dirt.  Students ate cooked cactus, and looked at pictures and small models  or real life things that would be in a desert.  In the book they explored prior knowledge and the importance of it.  They even went as far as discussing what prior knowledge was expected in certain text.  This made them the reader more aware of what they were reading and who the audience was intended for.  If they didn't have prior knowledge about a topic the discussions with the classroom helped.

Not only is content knowledge important, the knowledge about the way text is set up is even more important so that the reader can easily follow what is being read.  Schoenbach used several strategies with her students in order to help them understand the importance of prior knowledge.  One strategy she used was Ambiguous headlines.  The model is as follows: (Schoenbach, 1999, p.101)

Materials

Newspaper headlines that can be interpreted in more than one way (for example: "Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers," "Safety Experts Say School Bus Passengers Should be Belted," "Two Sisters Reunited After 18 Years in Checkout Counter," "Kids Make Nutritious Snacks," "New Vaccine may Contain Rabies," "Killer Sentenced to Die for Second Time in 10 Years," and "Miners Refuse to Work After Death").

Procedure

-Have students copy down an ambiguous headline.

-Ask them to write what they believe to be an improbable but plausible explanation based on a literal reading of the words. 

-Ask them to write what they believe to be the correct explanation of what it means.

-Ask them to write an explanation of the schema necessary to understand the correct meaning.

This entire chapter is made up of activities that would work in the classroom in order to help build knowledge.  Some activities include: Give one, Get One, Cloze Passages, Survival Words, Trees (Graphic Organizers), and New Portfolio Project.  I wish I could type all of the strategies out so that you could use them in your classroom.  I will be using many of these strategies in my classroom.

Acquiring Cognitive Tools for Reading part 2

Two blogs ago I discussed RT.  I mentioned that I would be talking more about this.  Every teacher knows of the importance in the four components of RT.  But what is important is the way each component is taught and internalized by the students.  According to Schoenbach (1999), "RT is a process that helps students monitor their reading comprehension and practice and internalize four cognitive strategies known to be key parts of the repertoire of proficient readers: questioning, summarizing, predicting, and clarifying" (p. 79).  When it comes to reading most of what goes on is invisible, or difficult for students to see.  "RT makes the invisible visible by explicitly teachign students to carry out the critical cognitive strategies proficient readers use for problem solving", as stated by Schoenbach (1999, p. 80)

Students should practice questioning.  Questioning is the most important process in the four components of RT.  Once they are able to question they will begin to learn to summarize.  students will need lots of practice summarizing text, or putting into their own words.  They should use key words such as first, the, and finally.  Next students will predict text.  A good way to get students to understand predicting is to think of the weather.  The weather man doesn't guess at the weather, he uses information and clues in order to make a good judgment call.  so a prediction is not just a guess, it is a judgment call based on what else is happening in the text.  Next students will learn to clarify.  Clarifying text means making it more clear by using meaning making strategies to better understand the text.  All of these components of RT take practice and don't come automatically.  (Schoenbach, 1999, pp.80-94)

Students need to lead their own learning.  When they are able to think about their own learning they will be able to better understand where they are struggling or succeeding and what they need to do to improve.  One great strategy is for students to chunk.  I have heard of chunking when learning words for early education, but I had not heard of chunking for upper grades.  In this book chunking refers to breaking down the text into smaller chunks to make meaning of individual parts then putting it all together.  A good analogy that this book by Schoenbach (1999) uses to teach students to chunk is about pizza:  "Even if you're really hungry...you can't eat a whole pizza at once.  You have to eat it a little bit at a time, in slices.  Understanding text is similar to eating pizza: though you may want to read a large amount at once, you may not be able to understand it unless you take it in bits and pieces. Depending on the type of text you're reading, you may be able to understand a lot at once or only a little at once" (p. 95).  Most kids like pizza, so I think this is a great analogy.  Students can understand the importance of taking once slice of text at a time.

Acquiring Cognitive Tools for Reading

Reading should be thought of as problem solving.  It is important for students to practice summarizing in class.  According to Schoenbach (1999), "Through repeated cycles of guided individual and group practice, students gained the facility to use each new strategy with increasingly challenging texts" (p. 76).  Teaching a think aloud process when reading will help improve students thought process during reading and help them to become more focused, and more fluent. 

According to Schoenbach (1999), Teaching the think aloud process looks like the following: (pp 77-78)

Purpose

The think aloud process helps students practice the mental activities, or strategies, engaged in by good readers.  It helps them focus on comprehension, and it helps the teacher know when and how students' comprehension goes awry.

Initial Procedure

-Demonstrate the process of using the following types of think-aloud statements while reading a passage you have not seen before to the class.

Types of Think-Alouds

Predicting

I predict.....

In the next part I think......

I think this is............

Picturing

I picture...

I can see...

Making connections

This is like a .....

This reminds me of....

Identifying a problem

I got confused when....

I'm not sure of...

I didn't expect...

Using fix-ups

I think I'll have to (reread, or take some other action to help comprehension)

Maybe I'll need to (read on, or persevere in some other way)

-After a few demonstrations, ask students to use a checklist to identify your think-alouds.

Think-aloud checklist

Make a tally mark each time you hear one of the following:

Predicting

Picturing

Making Connections

Identifying problems

Using fix-ups

Other

-Go over the checklists with the class

Scaffolded Practice Procedure

-Paired reading. After students have a few opportunities to listen to your modeling of think-alouds and to identify them using the checklist, have students practice think-alouds with a partner.  Each student should read a passage, pausing to make think-aloud statements as his or her partner listens.  You may want to ask listeners to use the checklist, tallying the think-alouds for the reader.

-Thinking silently. After they have several opportunities to work with partners, ask students to practice reading independently, paying attention to their thoughts as they read and using the checklist to tally different types of thinking silently or strategies, they engage in.

-Ongoing assessment. give students time, especially first, to share their self-assessments.  Have a class discussion on what is hard about trying to think aloud as one reads.  Ask students how they went about trying to solve any problems they had.  Finally, ask them to reflect on how using think alouds is affecting them as readers.

Applications of Practice Procedure

Choose your applications depending on your purpose.

-Have students keep a reading folder in which they enter the tallies of their thoughts at various points in the school year.  During grading periods, students can assess their growth as readers, noting any change in the kinds of thinking they do as they read.

-Guide students in discussing the meaning of texts that they have read in pairs or independently using thinking aloud or thinking silently.  This is particularly useful with texts such as primary source documents, scientific reports, essays, and difficult literature, which give readers opportunities to make interments, scientific reports, essays, and difficult literature, which give readers opportunities to make interpretations, draw implications, and link text concepts to other classroom activates.

-Using the think-aloud procedure to demonstrate the different ways proficient readers approach different kinds of texts for different purposes.

There are so many good charts and examples in this book I wish I could put all of them in this blog.  I would recommend reading this book!  Not only will it help student to read better in your content area it will help improve test scores, I really believe this and will be putting these processes into action this year in my classroom.