Reading Apprenticeship

Partnering with NC Rural School Districts

Sam Peters

Partnering with NC Rural School Districts

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WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship program has been awarded an $8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to improve subject-area literacy at the secondary level, working in partnership with rural districts in North Carolina.

The four-year competitive grant was awarded from the department’s Education Innovation and Research program (EIR). The project enables the Reading Apprenticeship program to extend its award-winning professional learning to 600 high school teachers in subjects across the curriculum.

Reading Apprenticeship supports educators in all academic subject areas to improve their teaching of academic reading and writing. The program engages teachers who have expertise in subject areas and helps them mentor students in discipline-specific reading strategies, while also giving them new ways to explicitly support students’ social-emotional learning.

The project will be led by Dr. Linda Friedrich, WestEd’s Director of Literacy, who said, “We’re honored to work with educators in North Carolina.” She notes, “Too often programs present teachers with a false dichotomy between academic and social-emotional learning. Reading Apprenticeship engages teachers in integrating their content area learning goals with literacy and social emotional learning outcomes.”

Under this grant, WestEd will work both directly with teachers from 50 districts and 600+ teachers during the grant period.

Reading Apprenticeship has helped more than one million students from middle school through college to become better readers and thinkers. 25 years of research has documented the positive effects of Reading Apprenticeship. Its effectiveness is rated as Strong by EvidenceforESSA.org and it is one of a few high school interventions listed as effective by CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.

Contact for more information:

April Spencer
WRESA
Secondary/Professional Development Coordinator
(828) 774-5681 ext #103
[email protected]

Dr. Deborah (DJ) Jones
Educational Leadership Consulting, LLC
Consultant/Executive Coach
(336) 314-7582
[email protected]

Sharon Sáez
WestEd
Partnership Development Director
(301) 997-1891
[email protected]

New STEM R&D

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Even in the midst of a pandemic that makes everything, especially teaching, very challenging, educators and researchers are developing new Open Education Resources (OER) – text sets, teaching routines, and inquiry sequences – that deepen learning experiences for middle and high school students. While OER is plentiful, many issues deter substantive use of free texts – such as the time it takes to assess their quality and relevance, not to mention crafting a meaningful sequence of inquiry for students that reflects the practices of the related field.

Since 2019, a federal SEED grant and funding from the Hewlett Foundation has been supporting leaders of our Reading Apprenticeship team, researchers, and science and engineering teachers to develop text-based inquiries – units that last from three weeks to an entire semester and align with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

This work is intended to support teachers’ use of vetted, usable, no-cost curriculum that enriches students’ opportunities to engage with authentic and challenging tasks and texts. At the same time, researchers are studying and documenting the process of developing these units so we can make them more accessible while also learning about current OER and teaching challenges.

You can see and hear what this research and development work looks like in a brief recorded presentation our staff and Sheila Hinchman made at the Literacy Research Association’s online conference in November 2020. Here are two quick glimpses of the dialogue in their presentation titled “Science Teachers Considerations When Designing Text Rich Investigations to Address NGSS” that illustrate this work:

Will Brown: A key process that was helpful for teachers was enactment of NGSS units that were text-rich – where they could explore how literacy could deepen the inquiry and also how the text could support students along an investigative and literacy trajectory – what classroom routines would be supportive without giving away the inquiry or design solutions…. Teachers discovered the nuggets of science students gleaned from some of these texts elevated their redesign argumentation so that it wasn’t just logical trial and error but based on science principles.

Cynthia Greenleaf: Participating science teachers built a remarkable array of complex texts into units, and these texts had to meet the criteria that they would contribute to the science understandings that teachers were trying to build… as well as being engaging and accessible to students.

There are many text-based inquiry units in development, so keep visiting our website and/or sign up for our quarterly e-bulletin. In the meantime, you can find similar units and text sets for science and history developed by teachers here.

Comprehensive Literacy Plans

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The U.S. Department of Education recently announced the winners of the 2020 Comprehensive Literacy State Development (CLSD) grant competition. Eleven awards were made to states and outlying areas to advance literacy skills through the use of evidence-based practices, activities, and interventions. The winning plans articulate clear paths for improving reading and writing for children from birth through grade 12; some have a focus on early literacy, but many also include new solutions for middle and high school teachers and students.

“These comprehensive literacy grants provide critical resources for states to support improved literacy and outcomes for students,” notes Partnership Development Director Sharon Sáez. “We see districts make strong gains with CSLD awards because the application process and evidence-base requirements help create common goals and services that align to solve persistent teaching and learning challenges.”

As an evidence-based professional learning approach that can help bring coherence to plans with multiple partners and supports, Reading Apprenticeship has worked with a wide range of states, districts, and schools to implement multi-year literacy plans in middle and high schools. Our professional learning services include coaching, networking, online learning communities, and Teacher Leader development. Read more about this work in this WestEd R&D Alert or check out our success stories.

We welcome the opportunity to talk with you about how Reading Apprenticeship professional learning, our OER and 9th grade curriculum, and other teaching and formative assessment tools learning can support your literacy goals.

Contact Sharon Sáez, Partnership Development Director, at [email protected] or (301) 997-1891 today!

CLSD 2020 Award Recipients include:

  • Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
  • Missouri Department of Education
  • Michigan Department of Education
  • Tennessee Department of Education
  • Louisiana Department of Education
  • Arizona Department of Education
  • Colorado Department of Education
  • Wyoming Department of Education
  • Texas Education Agency
  • DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education
  • Florida Department of Education
  • American Samoa
  • Guam
  • Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands
  • Virgin Islands
  • Bureau of Indian Education

Summer Learning Success

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This summer Reading Apprenticeship and Carnegie Math Pathways collaborated with the Rhode Island Department of Education’s PrepareRI College Readiness Project to create and offer new online courses for students and related professional learning for the course teachers. This unique opportunity combined in-depth learning and capacity-building for teachers with rigorous curriculum to disrupt learning loss for students. Over 1,600 rising 9th and 12th graders across the state participated in digital summer school courses designed to help young people develop the knowledge, strategies, and dispositions they need to become more powerful readers and mathematicians.

Students in 9th and 12th grade Reading Apprenticeship classes investigated their reader identity through questions like, How does your relationship with reading impact your identity and future as a student, a citizen, and a member of your community? Students read, discussed, and analyzed Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah to gain insight into the power of counter narratives to shape social change. Additionally, they built and practiced a range of metacognitive routines to make sense of complex text and worked on strategies to take control of their learning processes.

ELA students and teachers alike found that entering freshman were especially engaged in the challenging work: “This course was designed with student learning at the forefront,” said one 9th grade teacher, adding that “It has been an absolute pleasure teaching this book to this group of students. The journey of the novel itself, coupled with the engaging supplemental materials has been amazing. It has inspired many deep conversations and I think has really moved this group forward for the fall of their 9th grade year. It was extremely helpful to have common language from week one.”

Teachers also appreciated the chance to practice some new collaborative learning skills and tools they can use—both online and in-person. As one participating teacher said, “The curriculum was fantastic. I loved teaching reading skills in the context of social justice thematic texts and media sources. I also love the way that we were able to engage with both full groups and small groups for targeted instruction online.”

Explore our website to learn more about the Reading Apprenticeship approach and professional learning opportunities.

“Leading Literacy Across the Disciplines”

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WestEd Literacy Director Linda Friedrich, in collaboration with Mary Stump, Associate Director, and Sharon Sáez, Partnership Development Director, published an exciting piece in the AASA School Administrator earlier this year. Their article, “Leading Literacy Across the Disciplines,” discusses the importance of disciplinary literacy and focuses on the successes of two large districts, in Maryland and Michigan respectively, with their implementation of Reading Apprenticeship.

Visit the AASA website to read the article, and check out these additional resources for more on disciplinary literacy:

NAEP Reading Framework Update

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The public comment period has ended. To learn more, please visit: NAEPFrameworkUpdate.org.

The National Assessment Governing Board is leading updates to the Reading Assessment Framework for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card. The updated draft of the framework is now ready for public feedback. Webinars for stakeholder groups, including teachers, parents, and researchers, will be hosted throughout the public comment period (June 22-July 23, 2020).

This is an opportunity to affirm the draft or suggest changes, so that that the new 2025 framework reflects recent knowledge about reading comprehension, standards, achievement goals, and assessment. The current framework has been in place since 2009; these frameworks have a challenging role in that they are designed to measure trends in performance over time, so they need to last, yet be responsive to our changing knowledge and context.

The Reading Apprenticeship team encourages knowledgeable stakeholders — especially you reading comprehension experts out there — to review the proposed framework and add your good questions and suggestions to this important work.

To activate your literacy and framework schema, here are some of the questions that have guided the 2025 NAEP Reading Framework update:

  • How should the texts and reading tasks used in NAEP be updated to reflect contemporary aspirations and expectations for reading?
  • How should NAEP integrate reading and writing while maintaining NAEP Reading and NAEP Writing assessments and reporting?
  • How should NAEP account for the interplay between knowledge and reading comprehension?
  • How should NAEP take better advantage of the affordances of digitally-based assessments?
  • How should NAEP modify the content and structure of the Reading assessment and the reporting of results in order to more equitably represent students’ reading achievement?
  • What new theoretical and research-based understandings about reading comprehension and its assessment need to be reflected in the framework?