An Overview of the Academic Literacy Course, the Students, and the Results
Now we are getting into the meat of the book. Part two takes the apprenticeship program into the Thurgood Marshall Academic High School classroom. This school had a diverse student body and served one of the poorest areas in San Francisco. The curriculum was rigorous college prep coursework. Some of the students struggled, and this influenced their sense of academic ability. The authors pinpointed their struggle to be a result of reading difficulties. In response, they created the year-long academic literacy course and made it mandatory for all incoming freshmen. They realized though, that eventually, their ideas would need to be embedded into subject area classes. Many instructors who would like to adopt their ideas and strategies will not have the time, resources, or administrative support to create a stand-alone course like this one, and will need to find ways to integrate academic literacy into their existing subject-area courses.
The curriculum that they created was designed based on learning objectives in each of the classroom dimensions as well as in writing and research. They wanted students to think about these questions:
· What are my characteristics as a reader?
· What strategies do I use as I read?
· What roles does reading serve in people’s personal and public lives?
· What roles will reading play in my future education and career goals?
· What goals do I want to set and work towards to help myself develop as a reader?
These kinds of questions are essential to get students thinking about how they read and how they learn. Not only do they allow students to evaluate and set goals for their reading skills, they also help the student to develop their metacognitive abilities. In the previous post, I described the authors’ model of classroom dimensions, each of them containing and connected by metacognitive conversations. These are questions that they can go to again and again in these conversations, deepening student understanding and connection to the texts.
The Academic Literacy course was taught in four units. The first unit was Reading Self and Society. This unit explored students’ own relationships with reading, along with autobiographical texts in which famous authors discussed their own experiences with reading. Unit two was Reading Media. This unit used advertising media to explore writing for specific purposes, audience, and point of view. Unit three began to delve into academic texts in Reading History. Unit four was Reading Science and Technology. Breaking the units up in this way exposes students to different kinds of writing, and strategies for reading each one. This approach seems to be based on genre theory, in which we understand that different types of writing follow different rules and conventions. If we can understand those rules, then we know how to extract important information from different types of texts. (Technical Communication Body of Knowledge) . The same instructional strategies were used for each unit. Those were, silent sustained reading, reciprocal teaching, and instruction on self-monitoring and cognitive strategies (Schoenbach, et al., 1999, p. 52).
After the first year of teaching this course, they found that students made gains in both reading comprehension and in their reading habits and attitudes. The students carried these gains all the way through the end of high school. The next few chapters get into specific curriculum and strategies for each of the classroom dimensions.
As I read more of this book, it looks like a very practical guide to adopting the authors’ approach for developing academic literacy. Their program seems to be grounded in research and is backed by preliminary data. As they continue their program and as other schools and teachers adopt their program or strategies, I would hope that they continue to collect the results of their assessment, so that we can see if those types of gains are replicated in other students.
References
Schoenbach, R., Greenleaf, C., Cziko, C., & Hurwitz. (1999). Reading for understanding: A guide for improving reading in middle and high school classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Technical Communication Body of Knowledge. (n.d.). Genre Theory.
Why do you think they chose this specific school? You mention that they have a diverse student body and serve in one of the poorest areas in San Francisco but there must be multiple schools that fit into this same mold. This section seems so interesting because I want to learn more about college prep work. I find it interesting that most issues with college prep stems from reading issues. Their realization that they need to start at freshman year is similar to many research theories that the earlier a student is helped the more prepared they will be. Most classes also find it more convenient to do subject areas within their course versus having a dedicated course for college prep. The questions they come up with are great. They have the students find their strengths and what works for them. Especially interesting is how important and beneficial they see reading to be. The reading self and society unit seems relevant to understanding what role reading plays in the students' lives but it rarely a practice in classroom. The book seems to cover all sorts of texts which makes the book so much more useful because most of the time students only get to look at academic writing but this won't help them in looking at news, blogs, and other relevant sources. I agree that this method follows the gene theory as the units are split by different types of reading specialties. It is also important that they are looking at the students' gains instead of reading level because they are looking at the actual progress since the students were starting at different points when going to high school.
ReplyDeleteTwo of the authors were researchers with WestEd, a Bay Area nonprofit for educational research, and were part of their Strategic Literacy Initiative. They began bringing in teachers from nearby schools to form a teacher-researcher collaboration. This group, called the Strategic Literacy Network, looked at existing literacy research and conducted their own research on reading practices and attitudes of struggling high school students. The results of all of this work led to the idea of a reading apprenticeship. It seems like initially they were looking into embedding this approach into subject area classes. Teachers from Thurgood Marshall Academic High School were also members of this network. They believed that for their students, embedded strategies were not enough, and they needed a stand-alone academic literacy apprenticeship. So it kind of seems like the right teachers for this school were part of the right collaboration at just the right time for it to be chosen to pilot this program.
DeleteI kind of like the way the book looks at the dimensions of reading (you mentioned them in your previous post): the social dimension, the personal dimension, the cognitive dimension, and the knowledge-building dimension. They definitely broaden our notions beyond cognition. Then in this post, you report that they recommend that students regularly address the following questions:
ReplyDeleteWhat are my characteristics as a reader?
· What strategies do I use as I read?
· What roles does reading serve in people’s personal and public lives?
· What roles will reading play in my future education and career goals?
· What goals do I want to set and work towards to help myself develop as a reader?
It seems as if "reader" is a Discourse community, given this approach, which I can buy into. However, it might be just as useful to also apply these questions to their roles in a discipline. For example the first question might be, "What are my characteristics as an artist (historian, economist, biologist, etc.)?" Another question might be "What roles does reading (or writing) play in art (history, economics, biology, etc.). That puts reading and writing in positions of communicating within a discipline or community, rather than a community unto itself. What do you think of this idea?
I think that using those questions in the subject areas is a great idea. So often student come into a class with preconceived ideas about their abilities, "I'm no good at math," etc. But if they do start to ask those questions of themselves within each discipline, I think that, like it helped struggling students begin to see themselves as readers, it could help students see themselves as capable in that subject area.
DeleteMany of these books offer very similar insights. Several of the blogs that I have read have mentioned items like focusing a reader's characteristics in reading and the strategies that they employ. Many go on to tell how to model additional strategies. I'll read more of your posts to see what additional information is given, expecially concrete examples of what was done and how it improved the reading and comprension ability of students. Did the improvements carry over to other content areas.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your posting!