Preface

When you read, there should be a little voice in your head like a storyteller is saying it. And if there's not, then you're just looking at the words.

-LaKeisha, 9th-grade student

LAKEISHA'S classmates, gathered in a back room of the school library, compete to add their assessments of this new approach to reading that LaKeisha is describing. They are students of the first teachers ever to use Reading Apprenticeship, and they boisterously agree that they are reading in new ways.

Jason describes how his reading of the history textbook has changed:

I understand the book more now. Because I read differently. Like when you're reading, if it doesn't make sense, you can try to restate it in your own words, or you can make questions so you can understand it better. Now I read in between the lines. I basically get into the heart of it-like reading deeper into what it is saying.

Students also agree that they are reading more. Michael couches his comments as a mock complaint about his Reading Apprenticeship teacher:

Man, she's tryin' to be sneaky! She wants you to pick a book that you are interested in so you will read it more. She makes you find a book that you like so that you have to read it. Because you like it.

We began this work with students' voices at the center, inviting them to tell us about their reading. When they began to realize that reading should make sense, that they were entitled to understand what they read, and that there were many things they could do-individually and in the company of others-to deepen their comprehension and begin to build and use knowledge, they made rapid-and in many ways life-changing-progress.

In the first edition of this book, we described piloting the Reading Apprenticeship framework as it was embodied in the new Academic Literacy course required of LaKeisha, Jason, Michael, and their fellow 9th-grade students at San Francisco's Thurgood Marshall Academic High School. By the end of the 1996-1997 year, reading scores for those 200 students had jumped more than two grade levels on a nationally normed reading test. Student gains were consistent across ethnic groups and across the classrooms of the four teachers who taught the course. During the next school year, students held on to what they had learned: their reading achievement continued to grow at an accelerated rate, as measured by a standardized reading test.

Over the 25-plus years since it was piloted with LaKeisha and her peers, Reading Apprenticeship has benefited the students of over 150,000 U.S. middle school, high school, and college educators who have read Reading for Understanding, participated in Reading Apprenticeship professional development, used Reading Apprenticeship approaches in their courses, and brought Reading Apprenticeship approaches to their colleagues. During this same period, educators in Canada, Europe, New Zealand, Asia, and Africa have pored over and translated Reading Apprenticeship methods and messages into their settings and languages.

Reading Apprenticeship has also been the focus of much research (see Chapter One) and the recipient of multiple large-scale dissemination grants supported by the U.S. Department of Education and many educationally oriented philanthropic foundations. Several randomized controlled studies have found statistically significant benefits for students in Reading Apprenticeship classrooms. These gains have included improved attendance, course completion, and attitudes and confidence about reading, as well as higher achievement on reading comprehension and subject-matter standardized tests-all compared to students in control groups. These studies have demonstrated that skillful implementation of Reading Apprenticeship produces benefits for students in changed approaches to complex reading, in reading engagement, and in academic identity and achievement.

The impact of Reading Apprenticeship in college settings is also promising. Multiple studies have documented classroom instruction that markedly increases students' confidence and engagement in learning. In classrooms where achievement and persistence data have been collected, increased student grades, rates of course completion, and retention in school are typical.

Since the first edition of this book, we have published several related volumes and, in response to requests from the field, several new curricula. In 2012, we updated the first edition, tapping a great well of inspiration from middle and high school and college teachers who had adapted their teaching to implement, and inform, the framework. That second edition offered guidance from middle school, high school and college classrooms, showing Reading Apprenticeship implementation across the academic subject areas and disciplines. It illustrated how, in the hands of educators at all levels and in different settings, Reading Apprenticeship approaches can serve learners who bring richly diverse cultural and linguistic assets and varied instructional needs to the classroom.

As a framework that offers teachers a coherent yet adaptable approach to literacy learning, Reading Apprenticeship has been an important force in the fields of adolescent and disciplinary literacy in middle and high schools and in college. Students' voices and a vision of engaged academic literacy for all have been touchstones for our work all along the way.

Why We Wrote a Third Edition

Reading Apprenticeship is as timely and important today as it ever has been. In this third edition of Reading for Understanding, the core principles that drive Reading Apprenticeship remain solidly in place. Indeed, in some important ways the field has only recently caught up with the vision that has animated Reading Apprenticeship from the start, as evident in the field's new focus on the socioemotional foundations of learning engagement, new research on disciplinary literacies, and a greater recognition of the social and cultural influences shaping learning. A new generation of research on reading comprehension has generated a richer knowledge base that only underscores the importance of the approaches to literacy learning at the heart of Reading Apprenticeship.

Studies conducted across the grade levels and academic disciplines, with funding from the Institute of Education Science's Reading for Understanding Initiative, have highlighted the positive role that social collaboration, language development, and metacognition play in literacy learning and achievement. As participants in this research initiative, Reading Apprenticeship researchers and teachers helped demonstrate how reading with a focus on disciplinary inquiry supports the growth of both disciplinary knowledge and literacy skills and dispositions. Studies have continued to uncover important distinctions in the kinds of reasoning and argumentation, texts and representations of ideas, and inquiry purposes that drive work in and across the disciplines, distinctions that have important implications for literacy teaching and learning, as the framework has long recognized. A new generation of interdisciplinary scholarship has also sharpened understandings of the social and cultural foundations of learning and development and the integral role these contexts play for all learners. Socioemotional dispositions are now understood to be malleable, with new research showing how educators can increase students' engagement and self-efficacy-and thereby their academic achievement. From its inception, Reading Apprenticeship has embraced these sociocultural and socioemotional foundations of learning and engagement. It has been designated a SELect program by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL).1 Reading Apprenticeship has received a Strong rating from Evidence for ESSA.2

Even as scholarship has affirmed the vital elements in the Reading Apprenticeship framework, the world in which students and educators interact has changed profoundly over the past two decades. The population of students in U.S. schools has become increasingly diverse. New academic standards call for readers to engage with complex text, to participate in inquiry practices that characterize specific disciplines, and to undertake tasks that demand close, attentive reading and depth of understanding. Perhaps most dramatically, given the growing influence of information-and disinformation-in today's world, the prevalence of digital devices has shifted the very nature of reading, as well as the forms of texts that readers must be equipped to read critically and deeply.

At the same time, Reading Apprenticeship has attracted a more diverse following, which has enriched the framework in many ways. College educators in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields have contributed new disciplinary tools and approaches to Reading Apprenticeship instruction. Middle and high school teachers participating in discipline-specific inquiry networks have long innovated with Reading Apprenticeship routines and approaches, most recently through a design network of science and engineering teachers who are developing open-source, text-rich investigations to offer to the field. Reading Apprenticeship teacher leaders of color, as well as those who are multilingual and/or multiliterate, have both enhanced our work and shifted our lenses and our language. And teachers-working in in-person, hybrid, and online settings, and using many digital tools-have shown how engaged, socially collaborative, and critical literacy...