Reading Apprenticeship

New College Publication and Online Conversation

Journal on Excellence in College Teaching

Presentations

New College Publication and Online Conversation

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Join college faculty, leaders, and Reading Apprenticeship facilitators in an online conversation hosted by the editors of the recent special issue of the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching.

Nika Hogan and co-authors Magruder and McCormick authored an article that is part of the issue conversation, and for a limited time you can read it here: Texts, Tasks, and Talk: A Social Learning Pathway to STEM Literacy, Engagement and Belonging (Dec. 2023). Their article presents a community of practice and designed to support California State University and Community College STEM faculty implement active, equity-centered pedagogical changes. Preliminary findings from their work suggests that participants experienced meaningful value, suggesting potential for overcoming the entrenched culture of lecture-driven instruction and inspiring culture change in STEM instruction.

To join the free live, online event register here.

We hope to see you there!

To learn more about how to get involved in the kind of work this article features contact us or read about the professional learning opportunities on our services page.

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.

Reframing Reading as an Inquiry Practice of Science 

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What can science teachers do to help middle school and high school students understand their textbooks and learn to write, read, and think as scientists, mathematicians, and engineers?

During this featured presentation, Dr. Greenleaf presented examples of evidence-based teaching routines and videos of science classrooms that illustrate how reframing reading as an investigation can help students gain solid science and literacy practices. If you are looking to improve science teaching and help your school or district meet ESSA’s evidence-based standards for professional learning, check out the presentation slides or contact us!

Presentation Title: Reframing Reading as an Inquiry Practice of Science
Date & Time: Thursday, March 15th, 3:30 – 4:30 pm
Location: Georgia World Congress Center, B309

Also be sure to check out the video, “Grade 7 Life Science” which was featured in Dr. Greenleaf’s presentation, and features a Reading Apprenticeship-trained science teacher model her reading processes on a science text, spotlighting the questioning for her students. The students then take up reading, posing questions, and sharing them with each other and with the class.

Engaging Reading as an Inquiry Practice of Science

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With examples from science classrooms, Cynthia Greenleaf explains key Reading Apprenticeship approaches that amplify the reciprocal nature of science and literacy instruction as exercises in inquiry. When literacy is properly understood as an investigation to construct meaning with and from texts, science texts, then—with their conceptual and linguistic complexity and multiple representations of ideas—graphs, diagrams, data sets, and so forth are perfect for stimulating authentic inquiry into the meaning of the ideas being presented.

Presenter: Cynthia Greenleaf
Venue: NSTA Virtual Conference: Connecting Literacy and Science with NGSS and Common Core
Date: August 6, 2014

Download the presentation slides.

Designing Professional Development and Classroom Learning to Increase Student Agency, Literacy Achievement, and Learning

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During her residence as University of Auckland Distinguished Visitor, Dr. Cynthia Greenleaf presented this seminar describing the Reading Apprenticeship research and design principles that engage teachers in sustained, collaborative inquiry into instructional content and student engagement and learning.

Presenter: Cynthia Greenleaf
Venue: University of Auckland, Distinguished Visitor Seminar
Date: March 18, 2014
Location: Auckland, New Zealand

Download the presentation slides for more information.

Apprenticing Adolescents to Academic Literacy in the Subject Areas

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For diverse secondary students to become increasingly independent, capable, and critical in their thinking, reading, writing, and speaking in varied disciplinary domains and in the complex literacy tasks of daily life, they need learning opportunities that help them develop dispositions, text-based problem-solving capacities, discipline-based literacy practices, and resilient learner identities. In this presentation, Dr. Greenleaf shared the Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework and its research base, focusing on case studies of subject-area classrooms and individual student literacy performances to demonstrate the framework and its impact on students’ growth toward engaged academic literacy.

Presenter: Cynthia Greenleaf
Venue: University of Auckland, Distinguished Visitor Seminar
Date: March 20, 2014
Location: Auckland, New Zealand

Download the presentation slides for more information.