Manitoba teachers participating in a three-year pilot project that rolled out Reading Apprenticeship in grades 5–12 reported important shifts in their teaching and students’ learning. “I am three weeks behind in my course,” says one high school teacher, “but my students have never learned as much.”
Another high school teacher reported important changes in students’ confidence and engagement: “I did a lot of “getting to know each other” with the students and really trying to build an atmosphere of reading right from the start. One thing I really observed over time was that students became very close as a class. They became much more at ease with speaking out in front of the class. There was a lot of risk-taking that I hadn’t seen before.”
For a middle school teacher, the difference was in how students gained independence as learners: “I feel much more like an actual teacher.”