One of the most powerful ways that educators have introduced Reading Apprenticeship to their institutions is to use the Reading Apprenticeship framework as a guide when they redesign a course or sequence of courses.
For example, accelerated English courses at Yuba College have included Reading Apprenticeship-related Student Learning Outcomes.
Metacognitive routines feature heavily in the shared lesson plans for Pasadena City College’s redesigned Pre-Statistics Math courses and in the First Year Seminar course, College 1.
Math faculty at CSU, Monterey Bay are also using Reading Apprenticeship in their development of a new Quantitative Reasoning course.
There are a lot of examples! This is a high leverage approach for several reasons:
- Redesigning a course is a great opportunity to fully re-work it, and in many cases that means carrying out designs for active learning that instructors have long had in mind, but struggled to squeeze in to their current paradigm. Considering metacognitive and literacy growth as important learning outcomes helps “make time” for hands-on problem solving, sense-making, and metacognitive conversation.
- The Reading Apprenticeship framework, its focus on disciplinary literacies and habits of mind, and its valuing of social-emotional learning can be a helpful touchstone through the sometimes overwhelming process of collaborating to redesign a course or pathway.
- Reading Apprenticeship professional development is an invaluable resource for supporting instructors learning to effectively teach the redesigned course(s).
Reading Apprenticeship supports instructors’ goals for learning and achievement:
- Reading Apprenticeship recognizes and builds on students’ strengths.
- Reading Apprenticeship classrooms create a climate of collaboration.
- Reading Apprenticeship classrooms focus on comprehension.
- Reading Apprenticeship teachers provide appropriate support while emphasizing student independence.
- Reading Apprenticeship students and instructors focus on inquiry, recognizing that reading and learning are problem-solving activities.
- Rather than “breaking down” literacy learning into a series of discrete skills, Reading Apprenticeship contextualizes literacy learning.
- Reading Apprenticeship emphasizes equity: the goal is to make complex academic texts accessible to all students.
