Reading Apprenticeship

Reading Apprenticeship 101 “Making it Real” Workshop Series Summer 2024

Webinars

Reading Apprenticeship 101 “Making it Real” Workshop Series Summer 2024

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In this free, workshop series, current and past participants in Reading Apprenticeship 101 have the opportunity to develop and share plans for core routines: Establishing Community Agreements, Personal Reading History, Think Aloud and Talking to the Text, and Analyzing Disciplinary Text Demands.

Participants will:

  • Connect with a professional community of readers, educators, and learners to share knowledge and ideas
  • Revisit the rationale for metacognitive conversation and core Reading Apprenticeship routines to support deep learning and disciplinary literacies
  • Begin planning to “make it real”–to try out or refine a core routine
  • Give and receive feedback on plans for making it real

 

Tuesday, June 18, 10:00-11:30AM PDT: Making it Real: Setting Norms

Tuesday, July 2, 10:00-11:30AM PDT: Making it Real: Personal Reading History

Tuesday, July 16, 10:00-11:30AM PDT: Making it Real: Think Aloud and Talking to the Text

College workshop on May 12 – everyone welcome!

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College Educators Share Approaches to Scaffolding Engagement and Critical Thinking

Many faculty feel that student engagement has been on the decline since the educational disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.  In a workshop series this spring titled “Reviving College Reading in Today’s Learning Environments,” college educators are sharing how the Reading Apprenticeship framework helps them navigate today’s complex landscape and to scaffold deeper engagement, critical thinking, and sense of belonging as students transition to college.   Sign up now to join the last session on May 12.

May 12, 10:00-11:30amPST:  “A Literacy Garden: Plant the Seeds and Watch Your Students and Colleagues Grow” will focus on how to engage colleagues in conversations and professional learning communities centered on our teaching practice and disciplinary literacy.

Lora Bagwell, Assistant Dean of English and Associate Reading Professor at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, TN, will share her journey of bringing Reading Apprenticeship to her courses, students, colleagues, and campus. She will share the successes and challenges of the process and provide practical advice for planting your own literacy garden.

College educators across levels and subject areas are invited to explore how the Reading Apprenticeship framework can help orchestrate active, culturally responsive, and engaged learning experiences for our students.

The first three workshops in the series highlighted the way that educators from different contexts utilize Reading Apprenticeship to support student learning.

The series started with “Reading to Learn Across the Disciplines:  An Introduction.”   Participants reviewed the Reading Apprenticeship framework and engaged in text-based metacognitive conversations which activated some of the core concepts that animate Reading Apprenticeship learning environments, such as that reading is problem solving, that everybody sometimes feels like an “insider” or an “outsider” with certain texts and discourses, and that educators tend to develop blind spots to their insider status when it comes to the texts in their discipline.  

The second workshop, facilitated by Dr. Laura Garofoli, Professor of Psychological Science at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts, focused on the power of metacognitive question-posing to drive students’ persistence with and processing of challenging texts. In “The Reading Apprenticeship Framework as a Roadmap Back to Student Self-Confidence and Re-engagement in Our ‘Post-COVID’ World,” Dr.Garofoli described her methodology of “teaching metacognition as giving honor to the thoughts, feelings, questions, and connections that arise as students engage with learning materials. Anything that your brain gives you counts!”  Participants reviewed brain-based research highlighting the importance of student-generated questions for learning, and then practiced mapping their “thoughts, feelings, questions and connections” with a text set focused on the impact of sleep on learning.

The third workshop also introduced participants to deeper scaffolds for helping students generate connections which lead to academic engagement.  In “Scaffolding Thinking for Deeper Academic Conversations and Writings,” Caren Kongshaug, a College Readiness Instructor from Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, WA, presented several notetakers she has devised to support three distinct “thinking pathways”: 

Nika Hogan, Reading Apprenticeship College Coordinator and the organizer of the workshop series, says that the sessions so far provide support for dealing with the ways the world has changed while reinforcing the ways that learning stays the same.  “It’s still about transparency:  these are the rules of engagement; this is how we are going to work together.  It’s still about creating a culture of inquiry and providing opportunities for students to dig into text and to construct their own understanding.  It’s still about asking learners to share their thinking, but what we are seeing from the innovations that these faculty are sharing is that a slightly deeper level of scaffolding helps today’s students marshall the focus to make connections to text that they can build on for academic purposes.” 

For more information or to begin your own journey with Reading Apprenticeship, register for the My 12 workshop, or explore these resources:

Reading for Understanding, third edition

Reading Apprenticeship 101

Reviving College Reading in Today’s Learning Environments: A Reading Apprenticeship Workshop Series

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What is the role of reading in deep learning? What counts as “reading” in our digitally-trending culture? This free workshop series invites college educators to explore how the Reading Apprenticeship framework can help us navigate today’s complex landscape and orchestrate active, culturally responsive, and engaged learning experiences for our students.

For more information, click here to visit our services page.

Learn from Reading Apprenticeship Practitioners

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The Reading Apprenticeship Pandemic Lessons for Higher Ed Instructors summer 2021 webinar series was created in reflection of learnings made during the unique challenges of 2020. Three Reading Apprenticeship practitioners and college instructors volunteered to share helpful adaptations they made for their online classrooms: Tiffany Ingle, whose presentation is linked here, and Lauren Servais and Ed Ferrari, whose presentations are linked below.

Answering the Call to Be Culturally Sustaining: Designing an Introductory Sequence to Build Community Online

Presented on August 17, 2021 by Lauren Servais, English professor at Santa Rosa Junior College, 3CSN Coordinator, and Reading Apprenticeship Practitioner.

 

Digital Annotation in First Year Composition: Into the Pandemic & Beyond

Presented on August 31, 2021 by Ed Ferrari, Assistant Professor of English at Crafton Hills College and former reading tutor and TEFL instructor.

Pandemic Lessons for Higher Ed Instructors: Collection Assignments

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View a recording of our first Reading Apprenticeship Pandemic Lessons for Higher Ed Instructors webinar from June 29, 2021. Presented by Tiffany Ingle, ESL professor at Glendale College in California and Reading Apprenticeship practitioner, this webinar outlines adaptations she made for online instruction during 2020.

“Collection assignments were my response to what I was reading about culturally responsive pedagogy and mastery based grading within the pandemic environment. After I started these, I realized I may never go back to how I did them before!”

Webinar recording is embedded below and presentation slides are linked here.

Register for the next webinar in this series, presented by Lauren Servais, 3CSN Coordinator and Reading Apprenticeship facilitator, from noon-1pm (pacific) on Tuesday, August 17, 2021.

Teachers Transfer Online PD Experiences to their Virtual Classrooms

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As many educators are faced with the challenge of teaching very diverse students online, they need accessible tools and prompts to get students reading and engaged with one another. Reading Apprenticeship seeks to foster text-based conversation; the texts can be news articles, videos of classrooms, fiction, or historical documents, but the focus is always on comprehension and collaboration.

Online annotation tools like NowComment help teachers get at process – teachers and students learn most from seeing not only someone’s conclusion by asking, “What did you make of that?” but also their process as they read/watch/respond:

  • “How did you make sense of this as you read/watched it?”
  • “What questions did you have related to specific images or words?”
  • “What life experiences have you had that support or contradict points in the text?”
  • “What did you think of what other people/peers had to say about the text?”

If you are seeking to support collaborative learning, or support your students in making their thought process visible, please check out this video featuring staff from WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship, National Writing Project, and NowComment. Their conversation is a rare window into how expert “teachers of teachers” are seeking to support teaching in online settings. Their essential question is: “How do we get our students to interact with one another and text in meaningful ways online?”

One way is using group discussion and annotation tools for online multimedia documents like NowComment. NowComment is an accessible, free tool, but as this video discussion shows, how teachers use NowComment is what counts.

If you are an educator who wants to move beyond thin, summative comments in your online classroom (e.g. “Cool!” “Didn’t like this.” “I don’t get it?”), you need to think carefully about:

  • How you might focus dialogue by narrowing your text
  • How to prompt your students with focused inquiry questions
  • How and when you prompt your students to respond to one another
  • When to direct students check back and read and respond to comments on their comments

As teacher and educator Irisa Charney-Sirott says, “What is useful about NowComment is that it gives us all a window into ‘real-time’ sense-making. Teachers can watch a video or read a text, and note—as they are watching/reading in real time—what they are thinking related to a specific frame or piece of text. This gives everyone a glimpse into human sense-making—what is it in the text or video that prompted your visceral response or analytic conclusion? This is profoundly different than a summative statement such as a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘I like this,’ and it gives all readers access to one anothers’ thought process.”

Check out the video and see Canvas courses, Inquiry Prompts, and NowComment examples for fresh ideas to get your students engaged in collaborative text-based conversations.

If you want to experience this kind of online learning using Canvas and NowComment, sign up for one of our Reading Apprenticeship online courses.