Los Angeles County Office of EducationDivision of Curriculum and Instructional Services

Reading Apprenticeship Trainingin the Science Classroom

Becoming Scientific Thinkers and Readers

Presented byDean Gilbert

Consultant, Science Education

Strategic Science Teaching © 2012 Used with Permission from the Los Angeles County Office of EducationLos Angeles County Office of Education http://sst.lacoe.edu

READING APPRENTICESHIP GOAL: To help students become more active, strategic, and independent readers by

• Supporting students’ discovery of their own reasons to read and ways of reading

• Modeling disciplinary ways of reading in different subject areas and genres

• Guiding students to explore, strengthen, and assess their own reading

Why teach science?

According to the authors of Project 2061: Science For All Americans

…science education should help students to develop the understandings and habits of mind they need to become compassionate human beings able to think for themselves and to face life head on.

Metacognitive Conversation

At the Center

Thinking about thinking enables readers to

• Become consciously aware of their mental activity

• Makes the invisible cognitive activities visible

• Assess the impact of their thinking processes

Capturing the Reading Process

Review... “Content Area Reading Process Analysis” worksheet FQIP: Focus, Question, Imagine, PredictRead... Friction at the Atomic Scale

Capturing the Reading Process

Talk to the Text... Make notes in the margins, underline, highlight, and circle words; ask questions, make comments and predictions.

Return to the Content Area Reading Process Analysis worksheet... Reflect upon the reading and provide comments in each square.

Capturing the Reading Process

Form groups of 3... Share your responses in each of the FQIP areas.

Quickwrite...

What do experienced science readers do when they read?

Small Group Discussion

How can we apprentice young people to become scientific readers and thinkers?

Students Reading a Science Text

Read…

Team Exploration of Organic Chemistry

Students Reading a Science Text

Let’s view the video of Dr. Brown’s students…

As you observe Dr. Brown’s students...

I saw... I thought…

Small Group Discussion

What did the students do?

What did the teacher do to apprentice the students?

Small Group Discussion

How did the teacher support each of the four dimensions of the Reading Apprenticeship model?

Social DimensionPersonal Dimension

Cognitive Dimension

Knowledge-Building Dimension

DIMENSIONS OF READING APPRENTICESHIP

Metacognitive Conversation

Supporting Reading Apprenticeship

SOCIAL DIMENSION

• Creating safety

• Investigating the relationship between literacy and power

• Sharing book talk

• Sharing reading processes, problems, and solutions

• Noticing and appropriating others’ ways of reading

Supporting Reading Apprenticeship

PERSONAL DIMENSION

• Developing reader identity

• Developing metacognition

• Developing reader fluency and stamina

• Developing reader confidence and range

Supporting Reading Apprenticeship

COGNITIVE DIMENSION

• Getting the big picture

• Breaking it down

• Monitoring comprehension

• Using problem-solving strategies to assist and restore comprehension

• Setting reading purposes and adjusting reading processes

Supporting Reading Apprenticeship

KNOWLEDGE-BUILDING DIMENSION

• Mobilizing and building knowledge structures (schemata)

•Developing content or topic knowledge

•Developing knowledge and use of text structures

•Developing discipline- and discourse-specific knowledge

The next question...

How can we transfer the Reading Apprenticeship framework to a classroom setting?

Capturing Reading Processes with Reading Strategies Lists

Set the purpose for students...

Ask students: What do skilled science readers do when they read?

Make a list of “Reading Strategies.”

Assign a piece of text to read.

What did you notice? What was hard? What did you do to make sense of text your read?

Share, revise, revisit...

Modeling and Practicing Think-Aloud with Science Text

Set the purpose for students...

Demonstrate and model strategies on bookmarks and checklists: predicting, picturing, summarizing, questioning, identifying problems, using fix-up strategies.

Students practice with science text.

Pair share.

Repeat with different paired configurations.

Revise Reading Strategies List.

Talking to the Science Text

Set the purpose for students...

Demonstrate on overhead projector.

Students practice with science text.

Pair share.

Revise Reading Strategies List.

Repeat with different paired configurations.

Double-Entry Journals: What and How?

What do I know? How do I know it?

Double-Entry Journals: I saw…I thought...

I saw in the text… I thought… (Evidence/quotes from the text.) (What you thought or

understood as you read.)

Reciprocal Teaching …we learn best when we teach others

Summarizing: identifying and condensing the most important points in the text.

Questioning: formulating questions about what you don’t know, what you need to know, or what you would like to know.

Clarifying: making sense of confusing text and potential barriers to comprehension.

Predicting: using information already given in the text to formulate a guess about where the text “is going.”

Remember...

Reading involves complex, invisible processes.

Making these processes visible helps students

become independent, strategic readers.

Students need to be apprenticed by content area teachers.

Students are motivated to become strategic scientific readers and thinkers when they are

active agents in their own learning.

Concept Development

Design a graphic organizer that reflects your understanding of the relationship between Reading Apprenticeship and research-validated comprehension strategies.

How are they the same? Different?

How do they relate to one another?

“The world holds no secrets

if you can read.”

Tom Clancy once said...