The author suggests that we apply recent research knowledge to improve our conceptualization, measures, and methodology for studying the effects of teachers’ professional development on teachers and students. She makes the case that there is a research consensus to support the use of a set of core features and a common conceptual framework in professional development impact studies. She urges us to move away from automatic biases either for or against observation, interviews, or surveys in such studies. She argues that the use of a common conceptual framework would elevate the quality of professional development studies and subsequently the general understanding of how best to shape and implement teacher learning opportunities for the maximum benefit of both teachers and students.

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Improving Impact Studies of Teachers’ Professional Development: Toward Better Conceptualizations and Measures

Locating learning in teachers’ communities of practice: opening up problems of analysis in records of everyday work

Academic literacies research has developed over the past 20 years as a significant field of study that draws on a number of disciplinary fields and subfields such as applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociocultural theories of learning, new literacy studies and discourse studies. Whilst there is fluidity and even confusion surrounding the use of the term ‘academic literacies’, we argue in this paper that it is a field of enquiry with a specific epistemological and ideological stance towards the study of academic communication and particularly, to date, writing. To define this field we situate the emergence of academic literacies research within a specific historical moment in higher education and offer an overview of the questions that the research has set out to explore. We consider debates surrounding the uses of the singular or plural forms, academic literacy/ies, and, given its position at the juncture of research/theory building and application, we acknowledge the need for strategic as well as epistemological and ideological understandings of its uses. We conclude by summarising the methodological and theoretical orientations that have developed as ‘academic literacies’, conceptualised as a field of inquiry, has expanded, and we point to areas that merit further theoretical consideration and empirical research.

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Defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy

This article, written for a general audience, focuses on the importance of keeping adolescents' interests and needs foremost in mind when designing literacy instruction at the middle and high schoo...

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Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents

In a 1996 American Educational Research Journal (AERJ) article, Deborah Ball and Suzanne Wilson (Ball & Wilson, 1996) made an argument for “integrity in teaching,” in which they framed integrity as the commitment to “fusing” the moral aspects of teaching with the intellectual The central question they explored was how to deal with conflicts between the intellectual work of teaching content concepts and the moral work of teaching those content concepts to human beings, that is, to people with varying perspectives on the value of the content, varying skill sets and ways of knowing that they brought to their learning, and rich and full lives that might or might not intersect with the content under study Ball and Wilson argued that these tensions produced constant dilemmas for teachers who must negotiate a desire to meet content learning objectives with their respect for students’ backgrounds and beliefs, which sometimes contradict or dismiss targeted content Ten years later, I would like to draw from and spin that argument by suggesting that a corollary of Ball and Wilson’s teaching with integrity is the concept of teaching with and for social justice Teaching in socially just ways and in ways that produce social justice requires the recognition that learners need access to the knowledge deemed valuable by the content domains, even as the knowledge they bring to their learning must not only be recognized but valued In this review, I revisit that notion of teaching as the fusion of the intellectual and the moral and ask a slightly different question: What does current research tell us about attempts to fuse the moral and intellectual in a way that produces socially just subject-matter instruction at the secondary and postsecondary levels? Furthermore, what would it look like to fuse the moral and intellectual to produce a subject-matter instruction that is not only socially just but also produces social justice?

Chapter 1 Developing Socially Just Subject-Matter Instruction: A Review of the Literature on Disciplinary Literacy Teaching

Throughout the United States, concern is growing among educators about the numbers of students in secondary schools who do not read well. In response, committed and well-meaning educators are increasingly advocating remedial reading courses for struggling adolescent readers. In this article, Cynthia Greenleaf, Ruth Schoenbach, Christine Cziko, and Faye Mueller offer an alternative vision to remedial reading instruction. The authors describe an instructional framework — Reading Apprenticeship — that is based on a socially and cognitively complex conception of literacy, and examine an Academic Literacy course based on this framework. Through case studies of student reading and analyses of student survey and test score data, they demonstrate that academically underperforming students became more strategic, confident, and knowledgeable readers in the Academic Literacy course. Students in Academic Literacy gained on average what is normally two years of reading growth within one academic year on a standardized...

Apprenticing Adolescent Readers to Academic Literacy

Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms. The Jossey-Bass Education Series.

Foreword vii P. David Pearson Preface xi CHAPTER 1 Engaged Academic Literacy for All 1 CHAPTER 2 The Reading Apprenticeship Framework 17 CHAPTER 3 The Social and Personal Dimensions: Building a Foundation for Engaged Learning 55 CHAPTER 4 Metacognitive Conversation: Making Thinking Visible 89 CHAPTER 5 Extensive Academic Reading: Extending Opportunities and Support 135 CHAPTER 6 Sustained Silent Reading+: Dedicating Time for Independent Reading 167 CHAPTER 7 The Cognitive Dimension: Assembling a Reading Toolbox 191 CHAPTER 8 The Knowledge-Building Dimension: Surfacing and Building Schema in the Disciplines 233 EPILOGUE Collaborating Beyond the Classroom 289 Assessment Appendix 293 Interests and Reading Survey 294 Student Learning Goals 299 Monitoring and Assessing Student Work 318 Curriculum-Embedded Reading Assessment (CERA) Guidance and Tools 323 Sustained Silent Reading+ (SSR+) Assessment Guidance and Tools 331 What Does a Reading Apprenticeship Classroom Look Like? 337 List of Downloadable Resources 339 WestEd and the Strategic Literacy Initiative 341 About the Authors 343 Subject Index 345 Name Index 357

Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms

Reading for Understanding

When middle and high school teachers reconceptualize students' classroom experience as a "cognitive apprenticeship," they begin to see the power of modeling their own strategies for reading and making sense of challenging texts in their disciplines. DESPITE THE increasing pressures for content coverage in the current high-stakes testing environment, a small but growing number of middle and high school teachers across the country are taking the time to teach about reading in their disciplines. They are learning to recognize their own complex discipline-specific reading processes and are helping their students do the same, implementing an approach we call Reading Apprenticeship.(r) These teachers' efforts have made a significant difference in attitudes and outcomes for many of their students, particularly for those who are reading well below grade level and who have "given up on reading."1 Creating Communities of Inquiry Among Teachers and Students Since 1995, we and our colleagues in the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd have worked with several hundred middle and high school social studies, math, English, and science teachers in a research and professional development program focused on "apprenticing" students to reading in those disciplines. In this way the students can become more engaged and confident readers of challenging academic texts. The teachers with whom we work are increasingly concerned about the gap between students' ability to read assigned texts and the standards they are expected to meet. However, few middle and high school teachers see their own abilities to read subject-area texts as a powerful resource for helping students approach these texts independently, confidently, and successfully. Because most secondary content teachers have not spent much time thinking about the mental processes by which they make sense of texts in their fields, this knowledge is invisible and therefore unavailable to most of them. Although researchers have demonstrated positive effects on student achievement when teachers engage students in subject-area work through increased classroom conversation and, specifically, talk about how we read in subject areas,2 this kind of talk is rare. Helping teachers become more aware of the literacies they bring to their subject-area expertise can open up powerful resources for teachers' and students' learning.3 In professional development networks across the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as through national institutes for teacher and curriculum leaders, we and our colleagues have been helping teachers to establish a routine in their subject-area classrooms of discussing their own and their students' resourceful problem solving with texts. The Reading Apprenticeship Framework The Reading Apprenticeship approach is an instructional framework embedded in the process of teaching subject-area content, rather than an instructional add-on or additional curriculum.4 Reading Apprenticeship helps students become better readers by: * engaging students in more reading; * making the teacher's discipline-based reading processes and knowledge visible to students; * making the students' reading processes, knowledge, and understandings visible to the teacher and to one another; * helping students gain insight into their own reading processes as a means of gaining strategic control over these processes; and * helping students acquire a repertoire of problem-solving strategies for deepening comprehension of texts in various academic disciplines. At heart, Reading Apprenticeship is a partnership of expertise, drawing on what teachers know and do as readers in their disciplines and on adolescents' unique and often underestimated strengths as learners. In any apprenticeship, an expert practitioner or mentor consciously models, directs, supports, and shapes an apprentice's growing repertoire of practice. …

Ruth Schoenbach

Papers

Apprenticing Adolescent Readers to Academic Literacy

Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms. The Jossey-Bass Education Series.

Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms

Reading for Understanding

Apprenticing Adolescents to Reading in Subject-Area Classrooms.