Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms, 2nd Edition

How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms

Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms, 2nd Edition

San Francisco, CA – When you wait twelve years to produce the second edition of a landmark book in the field of adolescent literacy, it had better be good. The authors of READING FOR UNDERSTANDING (Jossey-Bass, July 2012, ISBN: 978-0-470-60831-9, $29.95 / Paper / also available as an e-book) have taken the best-selling first edition’s research-based and now research-vetted Reading Apprenticeship® framework and brought it to life through a wide range of authentic classroom examples. Readers meet students from middle school through college—including English learners and those enrolled in AP, developmental, honors, mainstream, and technical courses. The examples clearly establish the role of Reading Apprenticeship in the context of discipline-specific instruction—from chemistry to geometry, U.S. history to biology, composition to nursing, and algebra to anthropology, English, and more. The result is a rich picture of how to engage resistant or defeated readers, build students’ sense of themselves as literacy problem solvers, and integrate effective literacy instruction into rigorous subject area instruction. Beyond examples, however, the book lays out the Reading Apprenticeship framework so clearly that its theoretical rationale, deep research base, and classroom-tested approaches serve as a reassuring model for teachers, administrators, and school boards.

Endorsed by leading reading researchers and educators at every level, READING FOR UNDERSTANDING presents a coherent framework and concrete examples for improving the reading and subject area learning of all students. Reading guru and University of California, Berkeley, professor P. David Pearson writes in the book’s foreword that it is “as elegantly practical as it is theoretically elegant. It is a guided tour, as one examine the tools of expert teachers as they engage students in a journey that is aptly dubbed Reading Apprenticeship—learning how to become a savvy, strategic reader under the tutelage of thoughtful, caring, and demanding teachers.”

Reading for Understanding describes the Reading Apprenticeship model for implementing what is now widely recognized as the key message of the Common Core State Standards: Every teacher is a reading teacher.  Three federally funded, randomized controlled studies—the gold standard of educational research—have found significant benefits for students exposed to the Reading Apprenticeship model, including improved attendance and grade-point averages, and higher achievement on reading comprehension and subject area standardized tests. In addition, Reading Apprenticeship is the anchor of a five-year Investing in Innovation (i3) grant from the U.S. Department of Education. This effort, Reading Apprenticeship Improving Secondary Education (RAISE), is underway in schools and districts in California, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Utah and will reach more than 400,000 students.

READING FOR UNDERSTANDING urges all secondary and college teachers to consider the ways reading is both used and taught in their classrooms, and provides the framework, examples, and strategies that will allow them to continue to rethink and refine their efforts.

Published in partnership with WestEd.