Background+of+Reading+Apprenticeship



=About Reading Apprenticeship= WestEd's Reading Apprenticeship helps teachers support students to become motivated, strategic, and critical readers, thinkers, and writers. This research-based framework supports middle school, high school, and community college students at all levels to develop positive literacy identities and engage with challenging academic texts. Teachers, schools, districts, and community colleges implementing Reading Apprenticeship find that it can produce a dramatic, positive transformation of students’ engagement and achievement not only in literacy, but also in learning across all academic disciplines. Reading Apprenticeship draws on teachers’ untapped expertise as discipline-based readers, and on adolescents’ strengths as learners. This proven framework:
 * De-mystifies reading; the training will help teachers and students see that reading is complex and that it changes depending on text and purpose for reading.
 * Makes teachers' reading processes and knowledge visible to students and vice versa.
 * Helps teachers develop a repertoire of classroom routines for building students’ sophisticated literacy skills into content area learning goals.
 * Transfers increasing responsibility to students through routines for text-based social interaction.
 * Builds students’ motivation, stamina, and repertoire of strategies for understanding and engaging with challenging academic texts.

Reading Apprenticeship Framework
Reading Apprenticeship involves four interacting dimensions of classroom life that support reading development: These dimensions are woven into subject-area teaching through metacognitive conversations—conversations about the thinking processes students and teachers engage in as they read. Extensive reading—increased opportunities for students to practice reading in more skillful ways—is central to this framework.
 * Social
 * Personal
 * Cognitive
 * Knowledge-Building
 * **Social:** The social dimension draws on students’ interests in peer interaction as well as larger social, political, economic, and cultural issues. Reading Apprenticeship creates a safe environment for students to share their confusion and difficulties with texts, and to recognize their diverse perspectives and knowledge.
 * **Personal:** This dimension draws on strategic skills used by students in out-of-school settings; their interest in exploring new aspects of their own identities and self-awareness as readers; and their purposes for reading and goals for reading improvement.
 * **Cognitive:** The cognitive dimension involves developing readers’ mental processes, including their repertoire of specific comprehension and problem-solving strategies. The work of generating cognitive strategies that support reading comprehension is carried out through classroom inquiry.
 * **Knowledge-Building:** This dimension includes identifying and expanding the knowledge readers bring to a text and further develop through personal and social interaction with that text, including knowledge about word construction, vocabulary, text structure, genre, language, topics, and content embedded in the text.