Four ingredients of the Reading Apprenticeship method

The Reading Apprenticeship/inquiry method (published by WestEd) offers a promising way to help students improve college reading skills.

Here is a prezi I made for a faculty inservice last week, describing four key ingredients of the method, which I describe as:

1. Use inquiry
2. Read in class sometimes
3. Keep it collaborative
4. Talk about the content and the process of getting the content from the reading

The theme of this approach is that content area teachers (e.g. people who teach history, science, welding, culinary arts, auto-shop, art, etc.) are experts in reading in their academic disciplines, and if they are willing to share that expertise with students (their "reading apprentices"), students can become more skilled in reading along with becoming more skilled and knowledgable about the content.

I am calling this the "teach a person to fish" approach...


Credit where it's due: I created my summary based on

1) my reading of the text Building Academic Literacy: Lessons from Reading Apprenticeship Classrooms, Grades 6-12, by Audrey Fielding, Ruth Schoenbach and Marean Jordan; and

2) my readings from the text Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms, 2nd Edition, by Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia L. Greenleaf, Lynn Murphy, 

3) attending portions of the RA101 online course from WestEd, and

4) the excellent presentation by Chabot College emeritus faculty Cynthia Hicks
at the March, 2013 League for Innovation in Community Colleges conference.