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Reading Apprenticeship in a Middle School Classroom
In Rita Jensen’s middle school ELD classes, students build a classroom community in which metacognitive conversations mean learning from everyone’s thinking. This article describes the Reading Apprenticeship approach to adolescent reading improvement and demonstrates the program at work in one classroom. It also discusses four key dimensions of the Reading Apprenticeship framework and classroom life: social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge-building. Students in Rita’s class benefit from a learning environment that incorporates all four.
Middle School ESL
Rita Jensen’s students encounter a new poem in their new language by Talking to the Text. We see close-up examples of their annotations and how this routine builds engagement and helps students identify reading problems and questions for collaborative investigation.
Marean Jordan, Rita Jensen, Cynthia Greenleaf
National Council of Teachers of English, Voices from the Middle, May 2001
From the Text
“In this classroom culture, students learn they can express their confusion, ask for help from their peers, and offer divergent opinions and interpretations.”
