Reading Apprenticeship

*Reading Apprenticeship is. . .

• an organizing paradigm for subject area teaching
• an integrated and student-centered approach to building academic literacy
• a way to arm students with appropriate strategies and mental habits that lead to authentic learning
• when students are invited to become partners in collaborative inquiry into the reading and thinking processes.
• when subject area classes are transformed into collaborative, inquiry-oriented learning environments that intellectually engage, challenge, and support students.
• a process that requires interaction of students and teachers in multiple dimensions of classroom life.
• a framework of learning in which social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge-building dimensions exist in the context of extensive reading and share the reading practice of internal and external metacognitive conversation.
• a classroom in which students are invited to become partners in a collaborative inquiry into reading and thinking processes.  The aim is to help students become better readers by making the teacher's and other students' reading processes 'visible," by helping students gain insight into their own reading processes, and by helping them develop the dispositions to put these insights and problem-solving strategies to work.

* these definitions of Reading Apprenticeship are from the second edition of the textbook Reading for Understanding published 2012.