Reading Apprenticeship

SEED Grant Professional Learning is Underway for 2021-22

What's New

SEED Grant Professional Learning is Underway for 2021-22

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More than 700 teachers in Arizona, California, Michigan, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin will be engaging in Reading Apprenticeship professional learning this summer. Teachers will experience and learn new ways to establish a positive learning community with student strengths and texts at the center. Teachers are engaging in three days of learning this summer, followed by additional inquiry into disciplinary literacy via monthly online networks throughout the school year facilitated by Reading Apprenticeship experts.

The Reading Apprenticeship team is thrilled to be working with so many middle and high school educators from across the country. This project is made possible by a SEED grant from the U.S. Department of Education. SEED grants are competitive and awarded to programs with a strong evidence base.

You can learn more about the project here, and more about the evidence of our impact on teacher practice and student learning here.

If you are an educator or administrator in one of the states above and would like a team of teachers from your school or district to be involved, we might be able to include you if you contact us very soon! Contact: Mary Stump, Associate Director, [email protected]

New Website Look

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Yes, you are at Reading Apprenticeship.org! We launched a new website in 2021 to make it easier for you to find services and resources and to celebrate 25 years of Reading Apprenticeship.

With this new site, we endeavor to provide visitors with accessible ways to learn about our professional learning approach, understand how to get started transforming instruction, and see Reading Apprenticeship in action via implementation stories and videos.

Teachers and instructional leaders and will find useful information about what the professional learning looks like on the services page. Research professionals and district leaders can learn more about our evidence base and ongoing studies on the impact page. The library of resources can now be searched and filtered, so everyone can access many publications and classroom and professional learning tools.

We will be regularly updating the site with resources, publications, and new services and courses, so visit often for the latest updates. You can also get notified of new content by signing up for our quarterly e-bulletin.

As with all of our work, Reading Apprenticeship.org will be kept fresh and relevant via continuous improvement and collaboration. If you cannot find something you are looking for, or would like to see something added to the site, please use the Contact Us form to send us a note and we’ll respond.

The Reading Apprenticeship team at WestEd expresses our sincere appreciation to all of the teachers, staff, students, administrators, researchers, writers, and design professionals who have contributed to this site and its many resources.

A Leader to Learn From

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EdWeek’s “Learning from Leaders” series features Danielle Kelsick, Chief Academic Officer at Environmental Charter Schools (ECS). Kelsick’s work is a wonderful illustration of how leaders can establish professional learning cultures that help teachers deepen their own knowledge and identity as educators, and also transform their teaching practices, so that all students experience “instruction that pushes them to think deeply and honors their intellectual curiosity.”

The article articulates how Kelsick has kept a focus on teaching and learning, even while navigating the pandemic and confronting anti-blackness. EdWeek notes that ECS staff members are reading Teaching for Black Lives and doing a book study together using Reading Apprenticeship strategies:

The metacognitive processes are helping teachers deepen their understanding … but it’s also symbolic—that not only can anti-racism and instructional rigor coexist as top priorities for a school system, but they can also reinforce each other.”

Teachers are participating in Reading Apprenticeship because this approach, as noted in the article, helped Kelsick find what she had been trying to “piece together over her years in the classroom—giving students the tools they needed to engage deeply with all kinds of texts and ideas.”

To learn more about the ECS and the role of Reading Apprenticeship in transforming teaching and learning, read the article or contact us.

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