Teachers get confused that doing particular activities at the start of the year to set a classroom culture is the extent of how the social and personal dimensions operate in Reading Apprenticeship. If you're paying attention to the social and personal dimensions, building safety in your classroom takes more than a getting-to-know-you activity or norm building or personal reading history. These are important, no question, but they're just the beginning of what it means to build a classroom that feels safe. And students do need to feel safe if you're asking them to talk about being confused about something you asked them to read.
It's also important to keep in mind how all the dimensions keep interacting, all the time. Maybe the next time students are reading something really hard, you ask them to stop and reflect with a partner. They're going to need to be metacognitive, they're going to need to collaborate, they have an opportunity to develop stamina and to use cognitive strategies, they're probably going to learn something - all from a three-minute Think-Pair-Share - if the social and personal dimensions are being tended. The more experience you have with Reading Apprenticeship, the more you will appreciate the genius of how the dimensions are always interacting and the social and personal dimensions are always instrumental to the learning. They make the learning possible!At this time in the school year, the crunch often starts to set in when we feel that the content does not allow for us to continue building the personal and social dimensions. On the other hand, though, we know and have experienced that when students are addressed as individuals with their own emotional and personal needs, they are more able to accept and learn the content. The personal and social dimensions are conduits to the content; therefore, students are positioned to be ready to learn more deeply. This is a steady reminder to all of us that a single routine has incredible power in honoring our students and their learning.
Some other routines that readily work on building these dimensions include the following: small group discussion (especially before large group share out), comments on students' questions in their homework/T4s, modelling complex texts for students (taking the risk with them), sharing chapter annotations and trying to answer questions raised by a peer, individual time to reflect on a question before discussion.
And to think that this is just one quote from Chapter 3! Enjoy your reading of Chapters 3 and 4 over the next three weeks.
