The Reading Apprenticeship Framework seems to be a great way for teachers of all disciplines to be cognisant of their ability to teach students about reading in their content area. It's pretty obvious that readers approach text in different ways depending on the content. For example, when I think about myself as a reader. If I'm reading something for school or work and I read a paragraph without realizing it I go back and reread. On the other hand, if I was reading a novel for enjoyment and zoned out for a few paragraphs I am less likely to reread for deep understanding. I imagine that our students can see reading materials differently as well.
In my opinion one of the most valuable aspects of the Reading Apprenticeship Framework is the social dimension. It was mentioned in the Martinez article that critical thinking and metacognition are best practiced in social settings. Building a community of readers in any classroom gives students the freedom to express confusion and opens the dialogue about topics of discussion. When students collaborate and form communities they have more memorable learning experiences. In addition, when students have the change to read through a text in a small group they are more likely to think critically of the text. Critical thinking is something students do better and more often in a social setting. Students working on a text in a small group are more likely to criticize the text or reveal potential bias then if they were reading a whole group. Socratic seminars are used by teachers as way of getting students to talk about text and use text to help argue their stance on an issue. The video here gives a short description of how socratic seminars work in a classroom. These seminars contribute greatly to the creation of learning community where students are at the center rather than the teacher.
Teaching students explicitly about metacognition is something that we have been using in the elementary classrooms for years. Teachers think aloud and students share their thoughts as the teacher reads aloud from a picture book, making predictions, inferences, and using context clues to construct meaning. As a person with an elementary background, modeling my thinking is nothing new. It is a great asset for teachers of middle/upper grades that have not been instructed to model their thinking about a science or social studies text. I suppose that students get to a certain age and we assume they want to read everything on their own. Reading and thinking aloud in a small group can be especially helpful for struggling readers in the upper grades.
In the Martinez piece he talks about how metacognition ideally becomes automatic. My concern with secondary literacy is that we can focus on metacognition, but what happens when their reading level is so low that decoding is not automatic. Can metacognition help those students?
I had not thought previously about how students in upper grades might want to read in groups to help their understanding of difficult material. I can see incorporating this into a science classroom by integrating science articles above grade level and encouraging students to work through them in groups.
ReplyDeletePerhaps decoding at upper levels can also be modeled? The practices we discussed could be modeled even with an article abstract as complicated as the one we went through in class. For instance, working through an abstract like that in front of the class and saying each step we are taking to make sense could be modeled, and then students could practice this on their own. Students reading at grade level could be given articles slightly above grade level, and students reading below grade level could be given articles just slightly above their reading level.