Reading Apprenticeship in Academic Literacy · During the first week of class, Jill introduced SSR and reading logs and did a few “ice-breakers,” emphasizing cooperation. She

R E A D I N G A P P R E N T I C E S H I P

Strategic Literacy Init iative © 2004 WestEd Page 1

Reading Apprenticeship in Academic Literacy

Teacher: Jill Parmeter

Class: Academic Literacy, Grade 9, Mission High School, San Francisco, California

Profile: Mission High School is a diverse, urban high school. All ninth graders are

enrolled in an academic literacy class. Jill teaches five periods of academic literacy. She

meets with each class for one 45 minute period and two 110 minute periods a week.

Lesson at a Glance

The videotaped lesson occurred on a block schedule day in the second week of school.

During the first week of class, Jill introduced SSR and reading logs and did a few “ice-

breakers,” emphasizing cooperation. She also introduced the concept of metacognition

and engaged students in a conversation about their struggles as readers. The activity in the

video, “Conceptual Development: Reading,” was designed to build on this conversation.

Learning goals. Jill saw this lesson as the first step in building a community of readers.

Her overarching goal was to increase students’ awareness of the diverse ways and reasons

people read. In order to accomplish this goal, the lesson was designed to:

• tap students’ prior knowledge and experiences about reading;

• stimulate new ideas about reading;

• help students see relationships between ideas;

• begin building a shared vocabulary around reading;

• create student-generated “living” texts that would be revisited and revised regularly to

reflect students’ deepening understanding;

• increase student ownership of reading; and

• engage students in an ongoing metacognitive conversation—with themselves and

others.

Jill also wanted students to recognize the knowledge and strengths they brought as

readers and learners and the resources they had to offer one another.

Tab 12 - Classroom Vignettes - Page 1



Reading Apprenticeship in Academic Literacy



Assessment. In addition to building new knowledge, the lesson provided Jill with a

window into student thinking and an opportunity to glimpse their development in the

personal, social and cognitive domains of reading. Jill assessed student knowledge, skills,

experiences and learning through their written reflections and participation in partner

and class discussions, and their ability to categorize diverse ideas and synthesize them

into a brief, all encompassing written statement about reading.

Sequence. The “Conceptual Development: Reading” lesson engaged students in a variety

of language processes and cognitive strategies. In addition, it drew on the five dimensions

of classroom life that support students’ reading development. Students experienced a

variety of learning structures, moving from:

• individual brainstorming;

• partner sharing;

• whole class sharing/brainstorming;

• whole class categorizing; to

• individual synthesizing.

In the weeks following the “Conceptual Development: Reading” activity, students

continued to develop their awareness of reading and reading process. While conducting

inquiries into their own reading history and experiences, they also read narratives from

authors such as Malcolm X and Luis Rodriguez (Always Running), and answered the

question, “Why read?,” from these authors’ points of view.

At the same time, Jill helped students begin to build an arsenal of reading skills and

strategies that they could use to negotiate varied reading experiences.

SSR continued as a venue for building students’ reading engagement, fluency and

competence.






Reading Apprenticeship in Social Studies

Teacher: Monica Figueroa

Class: Social Studies/English Core, Grade 7, Oak Grove Middle School, Concord, California

Profile: Oak Grove Middle School is very ethnically and linguistically diverse. About half the students in Monica’s class are English learners. Most of these students are reasonably proficient in everyday conversation, but lack the vocabulary to read, write and speak well in academic subjects. Students display a wide range of knowledge, skills and experiences, but nearly all struggle with academic text.

Year-Long Routines

Almost all the information Monica’s students acquire in social studies comes from their textbook or other print material. Monica works explicitly on academic literacy, focusing on a handful of high leverage reading strategies. In addition to daily individual reading, students deepen their understanding and refine their use of these strategies through ongoing group work and frequent metacognitive conversations that promote collaborative meaning making about content and about students’ reading and thinking processes.

• Community-building. Monica introduces ground rules for discussions early on and revisits them throughout the year. Monica models the way she wants students to talk to one another. In addition, students learn and practice discourse routines in games such as “Opinion,” where they respond to one another using sentence starters such as, “I agree with ________ because…” and “I see your point, but…”

• Reading strategies. Monica introduces the concept of reading strategies and begins building a common vocabulary for talking about reading at the very beginning of the year. She focuses on five strategies:

• clarifying;

• questioning;

• evaluating;

• connecting; and

• predicting.







Students perform several reading process analyses to become aware of how they use these strategies while reading different kinds of texts for different purposes. Monica also teaches prereading strategies—looking at pictures, titles and subtitles and accessing prior knowledge—that reduce anxiety and build interest in the text.

As students become more adept at using the strategies and as their comprehension improves, Monica’s expectations change as well: “...My main objective was for them to be able to read and process the information and learn how to understand even complicated text, just to understand it. But once they started getting those strategies down, it was really nice to kind of like push it a little bit more to the point where they were saying, ‘No, I don’t think that’s right! We could go on the internet and find out!’

They were no longer just taking the text at face value, but were really critically thinking about it and even arguing with it now. So that was pretty exciting to see them do that and not just take it in and think, now this is something I have to remember and not react to it in any way.”

• Notetaking. Students learn a variety of notetaking strategies, from Talking to the Text to formal Cornell notes. By the end of the year, students use these notetaking strategies flexibly, depending on their purpose for reading and their own needs and preferences.

• Group work. Individual reading is almost always followed by opportunities for stu-dents to put their heads together and talk. During group time, Monica circulates, supporting both social and intellectual aspects of group work. Group discussions are generally followed by a whole class debriefing.

• Metacognitive conversation. During whole class debriefings, students work through comprehension problems and deepen their understanding of both what and how they read under Monica’s guidance.

• FQIP: Expert readers of history. As part of the ongoing metacognitive conversation, Monica asks her students to periodically revisit what they do as “expert readers of his-tory” using the FQIP framework, where students consider the focus, questions, images and predictions they generate while reading a history text. Monica notes profound changes in students’ reading behavior and engagement across the year. At first, stu-dents asked very few questions. Then they began asking clarifying questions. By the end of the year, students not only asked more substantive questions about the content, but were questioning whether they agreed with the text and author as well!







Monica believes students derive tremendous benefits from Reading Apprenticeship routines . “The very f irst benefit that I really saw early on, when I barely started with the Strategic Literacy Initiative, was metacognition, the idea of having them actually think about what they were thinking. It was just so great to me, to have them actually participate in their own brains. That their brains do these miraculous things and they can actually control that! So I think paying attention to the wheels in their head, knowing that they have wheels, and feeling pretty smart after a while is a major benefit…I see the pride growing in them. I see them replacing the ‘I can’ts’ and the ‘I don’t knows’ with, ‘Maybe I don’t know, but I can.’

“It’s a lot about empowering our students and equipping them with tools that they can use throughout school, and throughout life. Making knowledge accessible to them and having a belief in themselves. I think that’s essentially what it’s all about in the bigger picture. I would love for them to walk away knowing about Ghana and the Mayans and Charlemagne and those kinds of things. But what’s so much more important is whatever it is that they ever want to know from any source, that they don’t have to be restricted by their language or by their vocabulary or by their reading level. As long as they have their strategies, anything’s accessible.”

Lesson at a Glance

Monica taught the videotaped lesson in February, as part of a textbook unit on ancient Africa (Across the Centuries: Houghton Mifflin Social Studies). The unit focused on the three West African empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai. As students read about the three ancient empires, they generated an analysis chart of factors contributing to their rise and fall. The unit culminated in students writing essays identifying and analyzing common factors contributing to the rise and fall of the three empires.

At the time of the filming, students had finished the chapter “The Empire of Ghana,” and were beginning “The Empires of Mali and Songhai.”

Monica performed a text and task analysis to identify potential barriers to understanding as well as special learning opportunities afforded by the text. Because the text contained many unfamiliar words, or familiar words used in unfamiliar ways, it afforded an opportunity for students to learn new words in context. Monica identified a few unfamiliar words surrounded by strong contextual clues as preparation for illustrating this strategy.

Learning goals. The legend introducing the section on Mali and Songhai, contains difficult and ambiguous language and other challenges. Monica wanted students to:







• understand the genre of legends;

• monitor their comprehension of the text, including both what they understood and their confusions;

• read strategically, using reading strategies to overcome barriers, get the gist of the text and deepen their understanding and appreciation of it;

• use one another as resources for making sense of the text;

• add to their increasing understanding of factors related to the rise and fall of ancient Ghana, Mali and Songhai; and

• deepen their understanding of and become more metacognitive about what expert readers of history do.

Assessment. Monica used multiple sources to assess students’ learning, including their notetaking, their contributions to small group and whole class discussion and individual story board retellings of the legend.

Sequence. Monica started the unit with a K-W-L activity designed to stimulate interest and curiosity. Students looked at the pictures in the textbook and noted things that were similar to or very different from their own experience. “I’ll ask them questions like, ‘Does that look familiar at all?” “Is there anything like that that you’ve done?” “Have you tasted that kind of food?” [yams]. Or they see the Cowry shells and we talk about how they used them for money and connecting that to, now we use dollar bills. Anything that we can discuss, anything that they already knew or heard about that particular topic or anything they see that is similar to their personal lives takes that ‘this is boring’ out of it a bit and gives them a reason to f ind out, other than that the teacher wants them to and they’re going to have to read this, and replaces it with some curiosity, stimulating some curiosity and some connections.”

Students read each section of the text at least twice during the unit, bringing a different focus to each reading. They used a variety of notetaking strategies. In addition to Talking to the Text, they used a double entry journal, recording a quote in one column and answering the question, “What does it mean?” in the other. During the videotaped lesson, students jotted notes for their own understanding, using whatever format worked best for them. “I asked them to write notes on things that they did understand and things that were not clear. And when they shared with each other, some of them were discussing what they got from it. And others were clearing up what the foggy points were before they got into the discussion of







what they did understand. And both ways are great and f ine for them, it’s all part of them just trying to understand the text.”

In addition, as students read about the three empires, they added to their chart of characteristics of Ghana, Mali and Songhai. The chart was used by students in their analysis of factors contributing the rise and fall of the three ancient empires, the culminating activity of the unit.




Reading Apprenticeship in English

Teacher: Lisa Krebs

Class: English, Grade 9, Dixon High School, Dixon, California

Profile: Dixon High School is an ethnically, linguistically and economically diverse school

in a rural community in California’s Central Valley. Lisa’s class reflects the diversity of

the school as a whole. Among her students are English Learners, “resource” students

and GATE students. On a standardized reading comprehension test (Degrees of Reading

Power), students scored from the seventh to the 97th percentile.

Year-Long Routines

The videotaping took place during Lisa’s second year with SLI, a time of intense

reflection and change for Lisa. In previous years, she had been frustrated by the number

of students who slid through English 9 without reading—and discouraged by her

powerlessness to help them. After dabbling with Reading Apprenticeship tools and

approaches during her first year with SLI, Lisa revamped her syllabus in Year 2 with the

goal that “students engage at least as much as I engage every day.”

• Reading at the core. The single most significant change is that reading became the

dominant activity in Lisa’s classroom. In contrast to previous years, students did the

lion’s share of their reading in class, rather than as homework. As a result, Lisa’s role

shifted from retelling and interpreting texts for students who hadn’t read them to

supporting students’ own meaning-making. While somewhat apprehensive about how

this would affect coverage, Lisa found that she got further than in previous years by

refocusing on reading and purging the syllabus of projects that did not support her

learning goals for students. “Teachers will say, ‘I’d never get through these books, how

could you do it?!’ But when you think about 40 minutes a day of reading, that’s a lot

more than they’re doing at home. And that’s really engaged reading.”

• Building community. During the first week of class, Lisa set the tone for the year

by tapping into students’ knowledge, experiences, preferences and expectations about

reading. As students reflected, wrote and talked about what they do, like, and don’t

like about reading, she made a concerted effort to listen to students and take their

thoughts and experiences to heart. Lisa also introduced the concept of metacognition.

• Reading strategies. Lisa began the year by teaching the metacognitive strategies

of Think-Aloud and Talking to the Text that increased students’ awareness of their

reading processes. She also invited students to bring in their own familiar texts and







gave them the opportunity—and satisfaction— of watching her struggle to compre-

hend these materials. Showing students how she worked to comprehend texts helped

them realize that reading requires strategic effort—even for “good” readers. Later, as

students became more adept at monitoring their comprehension and solving reading

problems, Lisa introduced questioning, summarizing and double-entry journals, tools

and strategies to help students synthesize and deepen their thinking about the text.

• Group work. In Lisa’s class, group work functions both to support and challenge

students. At the beginning of the year, students garnered extra confidence and support

by reading with a partner or, occasionally, when a passage was especially difficult, with

the whole class. Later in the year, many students opted to read individually, coming

together afterwards to grapple collectively with meaning. Regardless of whether the

reading itself happened with a partner, the whole class or individually, students always

talked about the text.

• Talk. In past years, Lisa’s students spent their time answering ready-made questions

and filling in worksheets while Lisa did the work of interpreting the text. The fact

that students now read in class—and read to understand—affected classroom dis-

course in significant ways. As students engaged with literature, their thinking moved

to the fore and shaped classroom discussion, which in past years had been controlled

and dominated by Lisa. Students became increasingly confident about their thinking

and were often insistent about their questions, issues and points of view. Lisa notes, “I

think a lot of them are enjoying feeling scholarly—that it may be the one class in the

whole day where they feel like that.”

As student participation and engagement increased, Lisa’s role in class discussions shifted.

She still came to discussions prepared with talking points and continued to ask probing

questions to deepen the discussion, but she was increasingly comfortable and confident

that students would raise and grapple successfully with many of these issues themselves—

along with other worthwhile questions and ideas she had not thought of. Reflecting on

these changes at the end of the year, Lisa notes:

At the beginning of the year, there were times when I would step right in, as opposed

to throwing probing questions out to them to get them to come up with ideas. Like

recapping what we had read the previous day to set the stage for the day’s reading—I

sort of threw the question out and a couple of kids made one-line statements and

then I talked more about where we were in the story and what would be coming up.

I wouldn’t do that at the end of the year. And I’m not saying it was bad to do that

then because we were just at that place in the year, where I was teaching them how to







pull all their prior knowledge together and be able to take that into the next section of

reading. But it was just something I noticed we moved away from towards the end of

the year. By the end of the year, I would have made them speak more in some places—

I wouldn’t have swooped in to talk as much.

• Questioning. As students took a more active role in classroom discourse, Lisa

showed them that different questions require different types of interaction with the

text (she used Taffy Rafael’s Question-Answer Relationships [QAR] as her frame-

work). Students became increasingly adept at asking thoughtful questions without a

single right answer, and student-generated questions became the basis for class discus-

sion, essays and tests.

Lesson at a Glance

Lisa taught the videotaped lesson in early November as part of a one-month unit on

The Odyssey. The unit focused on “The Hero’s Quest” motif. Lisa also introduced sub-

themes, including the role and portrayal of women in the epic. The learning goal for the

videotaped lesson was for students to practice close reading and get the gist of a section of

The Odyssey through collaboration with their peers.

Learning Goals

The Odyssey contains unfamiliar language and ideas. In past years, students came to

class and listened to Lisa talk about the epic, often without even attempting to read it

themselves. This year, Lisa wanted students to:

• engage with and make sense of the text;

• read actively and critically;

• focus on their own questions and understanding of the book, not on ready-made

questions;

• assume responsibility for responding to the text and making the discussion happen;

and

• connect what they read to “The Hero’s Quest” motif and other key themes and disci-

plinary concepts.







In addition, Lisa wanted the lesson to empower students by showing them that they are

all readers and learners, and valuable and necessary members of a learning community.

Assessment

Lisa used multiple sources to assess students’ thinking and learning throughout The

Odyssey unit, including their study packets (with daily work, metacognitive writing, etc.),

notetaking, contributions to partner and whole class discussion and individual essays,

which students wrote at the end of the unit.

Sequence

• Before reading The Odyssey, Lisa introduced background knowledge designed to stim-

ulate interest and curiosity, to make the poem more accessible, and to help students

develop a picture of Greek culture and the Greek worldview. Much of the informa-

tion, such as Greek myths and research on Greek gods and goddesses, was text-based,

broadening students’ reading experiences.

• Students read select sections of the epic in class using Think-Aloud and Talking to

the Text to support their close reading. Lisa introduced each day’s reading by setting

the context and previewing any prior knowledge necessary for understanding that sec-

tion of the story. After each reading, Lisa debriefed with the whole class.

• Students also made inter-textual connections between The Odyssey and popular

culture. They read lyrics from a popular song and viewed a painting inspired by The

Odyssey. Lisa showed snippets of a movie version at appropriate points during the

reading, and students watched the entire film as a culminating activity. This occurred

after students read and talked about the book, so that they viewed the movie version

from a critical stance, rather than as a substitute for or true interpretation of the book,

as in the past.

• As a culminating activity, students selected from among four essay topics and wrote a

formal essay about The Odyssey.




Reading Apprenticeship in Science

Teacher: Dr. Will Brown

Class: Honors Chemistry, Grades 11-12, Skyline High School, Oakland, California

Profile: The students at Skyline High School are diverse in many ways. Ethnically, about half the students are African American, 20% are Latino, 20% are Asian and just over 5% are Caucasian American. Honors Chemistry is beginning to mirror the ethnic diversity of the school as a whole, largely as a result of Will’s efforts.

Any student with a B in algebra and a B average in science may take Honors Chemistry, and students with less than a B average in science may request Honors Chemistry if they have a teacher’s recommendation. The only fixed prerequisite for enrolling in Honors Chemistry is a B in algebra.

The inclusiveness of Honors Chemistry at Skyline High School means that Honors Chemistry classes contain students with diverse knowledge, skills and experiences. Some enter the class as relatively skilled readers. Others struggle with academic text.

Year-Long Routines

Will focuses explicitly on academic literacy throughout the year, emphasizing ways of reading, thinking and talking that are particular to science. Rather than presenting a smorgasbord of activities, Will concentrates on a handful of reading and discourse routines that he uses over and over again in different ways. The routines stress metacognition and collaborative meaning making.

• Community. A sense of community emerges gracefully as students employ these routines in the service of reading and learning science. “The direction of the assignments towards metacognition, towards responsibility of your own and your group’s learning, these things used repeatedly develop a sense of community and also a sense of responsibility for their learning.”

• Talk. Perhaps the most significant contribution to building community is the talk that is a dominant feature of the class. Talk happens in small groups and with the whole class. “We do a lot of group work in our class, a lot of talking about the material. These sort of activities are structured into even routine assignments so that students know that it’s their thoughts that are valued.”







• Reading logs. The textbook plays a prominent role in student learning. The primary tool to support close reading of the textbook is a two-column reading log. In one column, students record what they “see” in the text; in the other, they record their thoughts—patterns they see, questions they have, connections they make to prior knowledge. The focus of the reading log changes from chapter to chapter depend-ing on the content, the demands of the text and students’ increasing academic literacy skills.

• “Preambles.” Will regularly collects and reads students’ reading logs, but individual reading logs also form the basis for classroom discussions during “preambles”— daily warm-ups that bring students’ individual reading and thinking into the wider class-room community. Preambles are also the primary venue for reading instruction.

• “Expert groups.” Some preambles and assignments are done in “expert groups,” where each team responds to a different prompt about a topic-related problem. These problems often involve synthesizing information from multiple sources. After work-ing on the problem as a team, groups present their solution to the class and solicit their peers’ feedback and assistance.

• K-W-L. Students use the K-W-L strategy to monitor what they know, want to learn and what they have learned about a topic. Each lab is accompanied by a K-W-L, and K-W-L is also embedded in every reading log.

• Reciprocal Teaching. Reciprocal Teaching is another routine that weaves together reading and content area instruction. Will selects articles that take a few days to read so that students can practice this strategy over the course of the reading.

• Inquiry. Finally, inquiry is so pervasive that it can only be viewed as a classroom rou-tine. The spirit of inquiry is a common thread binding literacy and science in Will’s classroom.

Lesson at a Glance

The two week organic chemistry unit seen in the video occurred late in the year. The unit coincided with SAT9 testing, and the first week of the unit comprised shortened days. The video covers the first half of the unit, from Day 1, when Will introduces the “Organic Chemistry Team Exploration,” to Day 4, the mid-unit checkpoint.

Learning goals. Will had several learning goals for the organic chemistry exploration. He wanted students to:







• understand that carbon makes a huge number of different organic molecules because of the diverse ways it can bond;

• learn the names and structures of some of the common forms and families of those molecules;

• learn how to read science texts with notations particular to organic chemistry;

• see that our society has many practical uses for organic molecules; and

• have a working understanding of organic molecules that students encounter in various contexts (e.g., health-related, newspaper articles, product labels).

Will also had an affective goal—he wanted students to enjoy learning these things.

Assessment. Students were tested with a group assessment in which teams drew the structures of six particular organic molecules and drew six additional molecules of their choice from specific functional groups. Students could use their individual reading logs and the product of their team organic chemistry exploration as resources during the assessment.

Sequence. About a week before the unit, students were assigned a reading log for Chapter 19 in Chemistry: The Study of Matter (Prentice Hall).

“A principle that I use to decide when to use more literacy and when to use more inquiry is, if the content can be gotten with inquiry, then that moves up to the forefront of the planning and the literacy becomes complementary. And where the content cannot be obtained through authentic inquiry, science inquiry, then the academic literacy or science reading inquiry has to move to the front.” Because it wasn’t possible for Will to teach organic chemistry through authentic scientific inquiry, reading moved to the fore in this unit.

Reading logs were due in the middle of the seven day unit. The reading log directed students’ attention to the pictures and figures in particular. “Organic chemistry is f irst of all about structure and then function, with function coming from the structure of the molecule. So trying to make sense of the visual representations is central to the topic. I told students to take notes on the f igures and diagrams, and I listed which f igures and diagrams and charts they were to take notes on. They were also to attempt the embedded questions. There were a couple of articles embedded in the chapter and they had a choice to read either of the articles and write







a brief summary of f ive sentences or less. It’s the end of the year and their summaries should be getting shorter, identifying the big issues.”

In addition to the notes, Will asked students to write their response to what they read.

On the first day of the unit, students did the K-W portion of a K-W-L as a preamble.

For the next several days, teams rotated through four days of model building and two days of computer aided visualization. The model building and computer visualizations were designed to further support students’ ability to visualize and understand the ideas in the textbook. “When working with an organic chemistry book, the tools you have are your model kit and your pen and pad to sketch diagrams so you can get a handle on the complex things you need to visualize. Things you’re asked to visualize are not simple geometric shapes, they can be quite complex. There’s shape, there’s constituents, there’s connectivity, different ways things can connect, and there’s following and keeping track of who’s connecting to what and what difference that makes. And then looking for things that are the same in various molecules and things that are different. There’s a lot of things to deal with, so we use the scaffolding tools of drawing the pictures and using the models.”

While it may look as though students are using the textbook and other print materials to help them interpret the models, Will sees things differently: “The models help them read the text. The building of the models helped them make sense of the text and helped them make sense of the ideas of chemistry that were being communicated there. It does not qualify in my mind as a lab. It’s hands on, it’s a great activity, but it’s a literacy activity.”




Reading Apprenticeship in Math

Teacher: Dorothea Jordan

Class: Pre-Algebra, Grade 7, Oak Grove Middle School, Concord, California

Profile: Oak Grove Middle School is very ethnically and linguistically diverse. About a

third of Dorothea’s students are English learners. Most of these students are reasonably

proficient in everyday English, but lack the vocabulary to read, write and speak well in

academic subjects. Students’ scores on a sixth grade math placement test range from low

to average. Several students are enrolled in math lab, a remedial math class, concurrently

with pre-algebra.

Year-Long Routines

Dorothea works explicitly on academic literacy, tweaking reading strategies to address

the needs of readers of mathematics. By focusing her reading instruction on tools and

strategies that support problem-solving and metacognition, reading instruction also

supports mathematical problem-solving and the conflict between reading and math

instruction disappears.

Building a reading and mathematics community. At the beginning of the year, Dorothea

levels with her students. “I tell them this class is going to be different from any other

math class they’ve had. I tell them, ‘This is academic language, not just mathematics.’”

Dorothea also challenges students’ view of mathematics as computation—and, by

refocusing mathematics on problem-solving and collaboration, challenges their view of

themselves as “no good at math.”

Metacognition. Dorothea starts the year by introducing the concept of metacognition.

Students play games that require them to explain their reasoning. In addition to building

metacognition, the games set a playful tone that lowers the affective filter and builds

community. As the year progresses, metacognition permeates everything students do—

from articulating solutions to reading word problems. In addition to deepening students’

own understanding of their mental processes, metacognition provides Dorothea with a

window into students’ thinking, and demystifies math by giving students access to one

another’s thinking.

Reading strategies. Dorothea’s students engage in three types of reading: reading word

problems, reading directions and extensive reading.







Word problems. For many students, word problems are especially onerous. “What I find

at the beginning is, they read a problem through without comprehension and then give

up.” Dorothea helps students understand why word problems are so difficult—then gives

them strategies to deal with the challenges. She introduces each strategy in the context of

a simple word problem, then increases the difficulty of the mathematics.

• Close reading. Dorothea points out the density of math problems, which are filled

with technical words. She teaches students to monitor their comprehension and

to read and reread. She also teaches students to chunk the text—to process each

piece of information before moving on to the next.

• Text features. Students learn about the unique structure, vocabulary and organi-

zation of word problems by analyzing math “stories.” After analyzing numerous

word problems, students write their own simple problems, then revise their drafts

to add distracting details. Finally, student-authors write an answer key with the

solution to the problem and students exchange papers and solve one another’s

problems. In addition to teaching text features, the activity heightens students’ at-

tention to the question being posed. “They can see that there are myriad questions

they can ask for one set of data, or one story. So they realize that the question

itself is very important.”

• Questioning. One of the first things Dorothea does is teach questioning, using

Taffy Rafael’s Question-Answer Relationships as a framework. “I find the most

common problem is they don’t see that, often, the answers are in the text and that

they should return to the text to be able to work on the problem. And so just say-

ing, ‘It’s a right there question [a question whose answer they can point to],’ they

know right away what to do, that they have to return to either the directions or

the word problem.”

• Vocabulary. Math problems are rife with unfamiliar technical math words, and

familiar words with special technical meanings in math.

• Dorothea provides explicit vocabulary instruction. Students learn to recognize clue

words (e.g., up and down correspond to positive and negative in a problem involv-

ing integers) and to “translate” familiar words (e.g. difference) into math language

and symbols.

• Schema. Dorothea activates students’ prior knowledge about a topic. She con-

nects new mathematical concepts and vocabulary to existing schema, and corrects

misconceptions and builds background knowledge where necessary.







• Visualization. In addition to increasing reading comprehension, having students

draw their interpretation of a word problem provides Dorothea with a quick as-

sessment of student understanding and facilitates peer discussion. “Students told

me the most important thing they do is to draw what they’re reading, that gives

them a key. And it’s something to share with their group— it’s a window for me

into their mind, but also a window for their group members.”

Reading directions. Students use the same reading strategies to understand dense

directions accompanying math problems. Dorothea models by thinking aloud as she

reads and thinks about directions, then provides scaffolding as students think aloud about

directions. “I do a lot of having students read directions and explain their thinking about

the directions. I ask for a volunteer to read and then I have them pause frequently and

explain their thinking, because they tend to just read right through.”

Extensive reading. Dorothea maintains a classroom library of math books such as G is

for Google and Sir Cumference and the Round Table. “If someone is interested in something

and wants to go deeper, or has a lot of questions about something, I try to find it in a

supplementary text and we read about it there. So rather than me being the dispenser

of knowledge, we all go and try to find some more information about something.” In

addition to reading for answers to specific questions, books are available for students to

read if they finish their work early.

Talking to the Text. Students use Talking to the Text as a method for coordinating and

highlighting the many things they need to pay attention to and keep track of while

reading math. They monitor their comprehension by noting confusions; make notes about

vocabulary and text features; chunk the text; draw pictures; and identify the question, clue

words, information and sources of numbers.

Writing. Math standards require students to express solutions in clear language.

Dorothea’s students regularly write about math, putting key concepts and vocabulary into

their own words. Dorothea finds that students’ writing about math improves as a result of

the reading instruction she embeds in her math instruction. “I see a more sophisticated

sentence structure and use of technical terms in their explanations… When we see a new

word, we talk about the origin of the word and try to make a connection to the words

they do know. And I tell them, ‘I expect to see those in your solutions.’”

Group work. Group work is the norm in Dorothea’s class. Even during whole class

instruction, Dorothea frequently has students turn and “tell your table group in your







• identify “clue words” that denote opposites;

• draw a model of the situation using a number line or charged particles;

· identify the source of all numbers used;

· solve the problem;

· explain their reasoning; and

· build schema for transforming word problems into algebraic symbols.

In addition, Dorothea wanted students to talk to and help one another.

Assessment. In addition to assessing student work informally during the lesson itself,

Dorothea used a rubric that incorporated both reading and math to assess student work.

The rubric also served as a tool for students to assess their own progress. “I gave them a

detailed rubric. One of the items was, ‘Did you mark the text?’—that item was regularly

put in rubrics. Then I had them score themselves, and that would be a way to make them

realize how they could improve.”


Documents

Reading Apprenticeship in Academic Literacy · During the first week of class, Jill introduced SSR and reading logs and did a few “ice-breakers,” emphasizing cooperation. She