Reading Apprenticeship
Marley Arechiga in conversation with Cynthia Greenleaf and Linda Friedrich
Cynthia Greenleaf:
If we are going to nurture a next generation of scientists, engineers, writers, historians, teachers, problem solvers, we need to be able to tap students’ curiosities and capabilities and engage students in the hard work of digging into those texts in varied disciplines.
Marley Arechiga:
Welcome to Leading Voices, a podcast brought to you by WestEd, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan research, development, and service agency. This podcast highlights WestEd’s Leading Voices shaping innovations and applying rigorous research in ways that help reduce opportunity gaps and build communities where all can thrive. I’m Marley Arechiga filling in for Danny Torres.
In recent years, national reading scores have declined and student literacy has been deeply affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, we’re discussing these pressing issues with experts from WestEd’s Literacy team. I’m joined by Cynthia Greenleaf, a senior research scientist in literacy and co-developer of the Reading Apprenticeship Instructional Framework. We’ve also got Linda Friedrich, the director of Literacy at WestEd and director of the Reading Apprenticeship program. That program offers an approach to reading instruction that helps students become more powerful readers. In this episode, we’ll talk about what more than 25 years of Reading Apprenticeship research shows us about what works in developing literacy and what’s changed, and what is changing in literacy education as students rebound from the pandemic. Cynthia and Linda, welcome to the show.
Cynthia Greenleaf:
Thank you for having us.
Linda Friedrich:
Great to be here. Thank you.
Marley Arechiga:
Cindy, you co-founded Reading Apprenticeship more than 25 years ago with Ruth Schoenbach, the fellow leader in literacy education who has since retired from WestEd. Why did you and Ruth create the program?
Cynthia Greenleaf:
Ruth and I were working with a large urban high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we were working on a whole school reform effort with an interdisciplinary project-based curriculum. And as I studied the work that students were doing in their projects and met with them and their teachers to talk about their work, I found that students weren’t actually reading the materials we had carefully put together for their projects. Instead, they were relying on what they heard in class and what teachers and visiting experts said about the material. Over the next few years, we tried to get underneath this problem and figure out what was going on with students and their reading in middle and high school. We met with teachers across the subject areas. We found that students were often flummoxed by academic reading and they seemed to feel discouraged by their previous reading experiences in school and embarrassed about what they took to be their poor reading abilities.
At the same time, they displayed a lot of strategic knowledge and ability when they were working with materials that they chose for themselves to read outside of school. So that was a clue to us about the abilities that these students were actually bringing but not using in their schoolwork. We observed also the teachers sometimes circumvented reading to get to the content they wanted students to understand and relied on lectures, reading texts to students, PowerPoint presentations and videos, even in literature classes. And this meant that students depended on the teachers to give them the information and ideas, and we knew that without reading and interpreting texts for themselves, students reading would not improve. And as a matter of equity, we knew we had to break this cycle.
Marley Arechiga:
And how did you and Ruth work to break those cycles?
Cynthia Greenleaf:
Well, it’s interesting. We sort of stumbled on this. We asked teachers to read and make sense of their own subject matter texts as well as texts that were outside of their expertise. And we asked them to think out loud to share what they were doing mentally as they read. And we began to call this a metacognitive conversation about reading. By doing that, teachers, and we, started to see more clearly what they were asking students to do with assigned reading. They saw that reading comprehension actually entailed a lot more than they had understood before, and they also began to see how they could help students do the work of comprehending texts with their instructional support.
They also began to see how their own subject matter reading differed from that of their colleagues in another department. So beginning to take a look at the kind of disciplinary differences in reading, that became important in our work. At the same time, carrying out these case studies of students looking closely at their reading processes, listening to their thinking, teachers began to see the many resources that students could bring to reading. We learned how to engage teachers in inquiries into their own reading processes as a way of opening their hearts and minds to new possibilities for their students. And our professional development builds on this idea.
Marley Arechiga:
That almost seems like a really nice empathy exercise for the teachers to relate to their students.
Cynthia Greenleaf:
Right. By looking at their own reading, they get insight into how their students approach reading and how students can draw from their experiences to learn to read.
Marley Arechiga:
So related to that, I actually wanted to play a short clip from a teacher who participated in Reading Apprenticeship who kind of gets at how it’s the students really taking on their own learning. So this is Kristen Donahue, she’s a math teacher at Environmental Charter Middle School in Inglewood, California.
Kristen Donahue:
In my class, students do the heavy lifting. They’re the ones that are thinking, not me. My job is to plan meaningful lessons for them and to facilitate, but it’s my students who are unpacking the problems. It’s my students who are analyzing their own mistakes, and it’s their job to figure out what strategies work for them and what they need to practice more on.
Cynthia Greenleaf:
Yeah, this really gets at how the Reading Apprenticeship Framework offers teachers guidance on how to tap into students’ strengths and aspirations to actually turn the work of reading over to them in a collaborative classroom environment, saturated with texts and reading. Over the decades of this work, we’ve refined the Reading Apprenticeship Instructional Framework to reflect these characteristics. Our book, Reading for Understanding is now in its third edition, and it gives teachers concrete support and steps to restructure their classrooms in the way that Kristen was just describing, and gives lots of examples like that that are specific to different grade levels and subject areas serving different groups of student learners.
Marley Arechiga:
Thank you so much for that history, Cindy, and we’ll certainly discuss the book Reading for Understanding later in this episode. But with the history of Reading Apprenticeship fresh in our minds, I wanted to talk about some of what the program is doing at present. And so, Linda, you’ve been the director of Reading Apprenticeship since 2019. What are some of the challenges that the program is trying to help teachers address today?
Linda Friedrich:
Yes, Marley, one of the challenges, and this won’t be a surprise to our listeners at all, are the declines that we see in literacy scores and especially in NAEP. NAEP is the National Assessment of Educational Progress. One of the things that we see are that the eighth grade literacy scores, especially on NAEP, are down when compared with scores in 2019, just prior to the pandemic. And I think the thing that was most surprising to me when I saw the most recent reports is that the scores in the 2022 NAEP are very similar to what we saw in 1998. And so in 2022, less than a third of students scored proficient or above. Now, proficient on NAEP really represents a very high level of literacy. Still we’re seeing about a third of students scoring at that proficient level. More concerning is that about a third of students scored below basic, and in addition, we’re seeing gaps in performance by racial group continue.
So while almost all student groups scores declined, the gaps between Asian and White students and their Black, Native American, and Hispanic peers remain wide. And that’s really one of the things that I think reform efforts in this country have been trying to address for some time. I think what was particularly surprising to me about the 2022 scores is that scores for all groups went down even for students who typically were seeing increases in scores. Now keep in mind that NAEP is not a test of individual students. Rather it gauges how well states and districts prepare their students.
Marley Arechiga:
And are you seeing similar trends in other kinds of assessments?
Linda Friedrich:
Unfortunately, we are seeing similar trends in other assessments. For example, the ACT recently released an analysis of its 2022 scores, and these scores which do measure individual student performance are the lowest scores that we’ve seen in three decades. So, these trends in reading scores, especially the gaps in reading performance, reflect both trends that were in place prior to the pandemic and those disruptions to teaching and learning that occurred during the early phases of the pandemic.
Marley Arechiga:
And so how is Reading Apprenticeship helping teachers get and keep students on track in the face of these scores?
Linda Friedrich:
Well, I really think it goes back to that foundational work that Cindy and Ruth carried out early on, and our approach really is through the Reading Apprenticeship Framework, which both remain solid and is at the center of everything that we do. Our framework really addresses four dimensions of classroom life. We really tap in for our adolescent learners to those social and personal dimensions that are so important to engagement. And I think that’s especially important coming out of the pandemic that teachers are really seeing students struggle with those social and personal pieces. Then we offer students a variety of cognitive and knowledge building opportunities that get to some of the skills that can help students really address those complex texts. And I think that Cindy’s point toward the end of what she was saying around metacognitive conversation is just so essential and central. In Reading Apprenticeship classrooms, teachers and students are literally talking about what they are doing to help them understand the texts in front of them.
And finally, the Reading Apprenticeship framework acknowledges how important extensive reading of authentic materials is to each subject area. In each discipline, students need lots of opportunities to read and apply all of those metacognitive, cognitive, and knowledge-building strategies that we’ve been talking about today. Reading Apprenticeship also addresses the challenges that we see students bringing with us. By accelerating learning, we don’t just go back to the beginning of reading instruction. Instead, in each discipline, we’re presenting students with challenging texts. We’re helping them build background knowledge. We’re helping them apply those strategies so that they can read texts that are on or above their grade level, and that’s how we accelerate learning. We really see Reading Apprenticeship teachers breathe life into the Reading Apprenticeship Framework in their classrooms.
Marley Arechiga:
What are some of the things that you see Reading Apprenticeship teachers doing?
Linda Friedrich:
We really see teachers shifting the responsibility of reading from teachers to students. And I think that’s just like what we heard from Kristen Donahue. We also see them supporting students in establishing their own purposes for reading and asking and answering their own questions. That setting a reading purpose is really important. Sometimes the kinds of texts we read in school aren’t the most scintillating. The teachers are also really creating safety for students to be confused, to not know. Students have been told over and over that they need to master things that they need to know. And what we understand is that it’s really important to know and name as readers when we don’t know something that helps us figure out the complexity of the text. Teachers also play a really important role in teaching strategies specific to and in the context of each discipline, and they use text to build students’ background knowledge so that they can deal with harder kinds of texts that they will encounter over the course of their school careers.
Marley Arechiga:
Yeah, what you mentioned there about building safety for knowing or expressing when you’re confused is so important. That’s always one of the hardest parts about being in a classroom is when the teacher’s like, “Who has questions?” and everyone’s too afraid to raise their hand.
Linda Friedrich:
Exactly.
Marley Arechiga:
How have today’s digital and social climates, things like social media, the pandemic, and now AI, artificial intelligence, how have those things affected literacy education?
Linda Friedrich:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Increasingly, we see both students and teachers confronted with so much information and with texts that are mediated through social media, through online platforms, and it really relies on multiple disciplines as well as an ability to interpret multimodal representations of text.
Marley Arechiga:
Can you give me some examples of that?
Linda Friedrich:
A relatively simple example that I think a lot about are all of the graphic displays that we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic with hospitalizations, vaccinations, death rates, and those were some really interesting ways of displaying information that were different from reading one sentence after the other in a news article. Another thing that I think a lot about are some of the exciting work that’s happening in science with digital 3D models. So for example, models of molecules, models of the human genome that are represented in digital, 3D space that scientists and students can then manipulate. This is an important advance in scientific representations, and it helps scientists and students of science to visualize molecules in cells in very different ways than they were even two decades ago.
I think that more challenging is the rise of deep fake videos and audios that are being produced by artificial intelligence. And across all of these, whether they are exciting, positive directions in digital literacies and digital texts, and even artificial intelligence, are the questions of how do members of communities read and interpret these different kinds of digital representations? What’s the background knowledge that people need? What reading approaches are needed to determine whether information is verifiable, whether it’s credible, whether it’s reliable, and how do these new forms of text differ from the past? So these challenges aren’t really new. They’ve certainly been extended and exacerbated by the rise of generative artificial intelligence.
Marley Arechiga:
Okay. So you’re talking about how these aren’t new challenges, but certainly exacerbated by AI, and what are some ways that Reading Apprenticeship is helping address those challenges that you described, Linda, in today’s digital landscape?
Linda Friedrich:
Today, it’s probably even more important than it was when Cindy and Ruth began this journey, for teachers to really shift responsibility for reading to students. Because students are confronting so many different kinds of texts and challenges in their day-to-day lives, it’s really important to give students the support and tools that can support them in reading these kinds of complex digital texts.
Marley Arechiga:
I want to switch gears to the book, which also covers some of this material. So, Linda and Cindy, you both co-wrote a book with Reading Apprenticeship colleagues Lynn Murphy, Nika Hogan, and Ruth Schoenbach, who we mentioned at the top of the episode. That book Reading for Understanding how Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms is now in its 3rd edition. There’s a new chapter in the book, and I want to hear a little bit about that new chapter and anything else that’s new in this latest edition and the research that went into it. Could you tell us about that?
Cynthia Greenleaf:
Sure. Well, the new chapter zeros in on inquiry. You turn to a text, whether it’s on the internet or on a bookshelf or in the library, because you have a driving question often in academic work, and in fact the heart of all academic work is inquiry. And the kinds of texts that Linda’s been talking about that just proliferate in visual and graphic and mathematical and word form, all of those texts play central roles in inquiry and in investigation in disciplinary work. Reading for Understanding the book is an instructional guide overall for how to engage students in that kind of reading. Reading to inquire, reading to learn, reading to take action. And over the past several decades, it turns out that education reforms are reflecting that same emphasis on investigation and inquiry. So there’s the Next Generation Science Standards with their emphasis on learning science by practicing science investigation and engineering design, and of course, the common core state standards and the ways that varied states took that up into their own state standards. Those literacy standards reflect that same emphasis, and all of these are pressing towards higher academic literacies for all students.
That’s a big challenge, and teachers often wonder how to start given their students’ inexperience with academic reading that we talked about at the beginning and given the kinds of gaps that Linda was talking about. While the whole book supports teachers in developing classrooms where disciplinary reading is part and parcel of subject area learning, this new chapter zeros in, as I said, on the inquiry element. It offers vignettes at various grade levels and subject areas of students engaged in very disciplinary ways of thinking and reading. But it also gives a handy and helpful learning progression to give teachers a vision of how to build students’ successful engagement in that kind of disciplinary inquiry over time. The new chapter also acknowledges what a shift like that in classroom practice may feel like for the teacher.
And as one teacher said, “Making this shift was both hard and exhilarating,” and I’m quoting her now because I started to see that my students could accomplish so much more than I have known, and they were capable of digging into complex texts and doing the intellectual work. So, in this final chapter, we offer this teacher’s journey to illustrate her changing understandings of equity as she moves from seeing her role in equitable teaching as providing access to ideas and content to all of her students to seeing her role as actually helping students acquire the tools in reading and in thinking so they’re able to access that content and those ideas for themselves. Developing engaged academic literacy equitably for all students requires that kind of fundamental change of teachers in their identities and the roles they take in the classroom. From the center of the knowledge delivery system, they’re at the front of the class telling students, to instead the coach and mentor alongside students as they construct knowledge with text themselves.
Linda Friedrich:
So, in addition to what Cindy said, which is really the heart of the revision, there are two other areas that I’m really excited about in the new book, and one goes back to the conversation we were having earlier about digital literacies. We were also doing this research in the heart of the pandemic lockdown. So, one of the things that happened as we were talking with teachers is we really were hearing from them how they were going about creating classroom community, building students’ identities, while teaching in an online environment. And I will tell you that is not easy to do, and I think Cindy, Nika, Ruth, Lynn, and I were all really inspired by the innovative ways that teachers were taking up this challenge of engaging their students in a digital and hybrid learning environment.
The other thing that we were really intentional about is that we’ve been engaged with college educators for a long time now, and the previous edition of the book also had some college examples. We were really fortunate to have Nika Hogan as one of our co-authors, and she brought her lens as a college educator and her long work with other college educators to the forefront during our process. So, we have many more rich examples about what the Reading Apprenticeship Framework looks like in college classrooms as well.
Marley Arechiga:
Thank you, Linda and Cindy, for sharing more about Reading Apprenticeship and about your book Reading for Understanding. Before we wrap it up, I wanted to open the floor for any final thoughts for our listeners today.
Linda Friedrich:
Thanks, Marley. One theme that Cindy and I have been touching on is the importance of both teachers and students reading challenging texts. In particular, it’s important for teachers to read texts that are outside their comfort zone and outside their subject area expertise. So a history teacher can probably fluently read a thousand-page book about a particular era in history. That same teacher when reading a text in physics may come across challenges, and that sort of confrontation of difficulty helps teachers both build empathy for their students and helps them think about how can I support my students?
What are the strategies? What are the routines for my students so that they can read the challenging text in my discipline?
Cynthia Greenleaf:
It turns out, if you look at the research that’s been done on this, that believe it or not, students actually are more engaged when they have complex texts in front of them to really dig into. So, that’s a really interesting thing, and it’s very important for us to remember because if we are going to nurture a next generation of scientists, engineers, writers, historians, teachers, problem solvers, we need to be able to tap students’ curiosities and capabilities and engage students in the hard work of digging into those texts in varied disciplines, and help them to really expand their interest skills and capacities.
Marley Arechiga:
With that, Linda and Cindy, thank you so much for taking time to talk with me today.
Cynthia Greenleaf:
You’re welcome. Thanks for having us.
Linda Friedrich:
You’re welcome. Thank you, Marley.
Marley Arechiga:
And thank you to our listeners for joining us. The resources we mentioned in this episode, including the NAEP 2022 Snapshot are available online at WestEd.org/leadingvoicespodcast, or in the show notes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and Spotify. For more resources, tools, and information about improving student literacy, visit the Reading Apprenticeship website at readingapprenticeship.org.
This podcast is brought to you by WestEd, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan research, development, and service agency. At WestEd, we believe that learning changes lives. Every day, we partner with schools and communities across the country to improve outcomes for youth and adults of all ages. Today’s episode focused on just one important facet of WestEd’s work, and I encourage you to visit us at WestEd.org to learn more. Special thanks to Gretchen Wright, Pamela Polk and host Danny Torres for editorial support on this episode. And to Sanjay Pardanani, our audio producer, thank you for joining us. Until next time.