Los Angeles County Office of Education
Division of Curriculum and Instructional Services
Reading Apprenticeship Training
in the Science Classroom
Becoming Scientific Thinkers
and Readers
Presented by
Dean Gilbert
Consultant, Science Education
Strategic Science Teaching © 2012
Los Angeles County Office of Education
Used with Permission from the Los Angeles County Office of Education
http://sst.lacoe.edu
READING APPRENTICESHIP GOAL:
To help students become more active,
strategic, and independent readers by
• Supporting students’ discovery of their own
reasons to read and ways of reading
• Modeling disciplinary ways of reading in
different subject areas and genres
• Guiding students to explore, strengthen, and
assess their own reading
Why teach science?
According to the authors of Project 2061:
Science For All Americans
…science education should help students to
develop the understandings and habits of
mind they need to become compassionate
human beings able to think for
themselves and to face life head on.
Metacognitive Conversation
At the Center
Thinking about thinking enables readers to
• Become consciously aware of their mental activity
• Makes the invisible cognitive activities visible
• Assess the impact of their thinking processes
Capturing the Reading Process
Review...
“Content Area Reading Process Analysis”
worksheet
FQIP: Focus, Question, Imagine, Predict
Read...
Friction at the Atomic Scale
Capturing the Reading Process
Talk to the Text...
Make notes in the margins, underline, highlight,
and circle words; ask questions, make comments
and predictions.
Return to the Content Area Reading Process
Analysis worksheet...
Reflect upon the reading and provide comments in
each square.
Capturing the Reading Process
Form groups of 3...
Share your responses in each of the FQIP areas.
Quickwrite...
What do experienced science readers
do when they read?
Small Group Discussion
How can we apprentice young people
to become scientific readers and
thinkers?
Students Reading a Science Text
Read…
Team Exploration of Organic Chemistry
Students Reading a Science Text
Let’s view the video of Dr. Brown’s
students…
As you observe Dr. Brown’s students...
I saw...
I thought…
Small Group Discussion
What did the students do?
What did the teacher do to apprentice
the students?
Small Group Discussion
How did the teacher support each of
the four dimensions of the Reading
Apprenticeship model?
DIMENSIONS OF READING APPRENTICESHIP
Personal Dimension
Social Dimension
Metacognitive
Conversation
Cognitive Dimension
Knowledge-Building
Dimension
Supporting Reading Apprenticeship
SOCIAL DIMENSION
• Creating safety
• Investigating the
relationship between
literacy and power
• Sharing book talk
• Sharing reading processes,
problems, and solutions
• Noticing and appropriating
others’ ways of reading
Supporting Reading Apprenticeship
PERSONAL
DIMENSION
• Developing reader
identity
• Developing
metacognition
• Developing reader
fluency and stamina
• Developing reader
confidence and range
Supporting Reading Apprenticeship
COGNITIVE
DIMENSION
• Getting the big picture
• Breaking it down
• Monitoring comprehension
• Using problem-solving
strategies to assist and restore
comprehension
• Setting reading purposes and
adjusting reading processes
Supporting Reading Apprenticeship
KNOWLEDGEBUILDING DIMENSION
• Mobilizing and building
knowledge structures
(schemata)
•Developing content or topic
knowledge
•Developing knowledge and use
of text structures
•Developing discipline- and
discourse-specific knowledge
The next question...
How can we transfer the Reading
Apprenticeship framework to a
classroom setting?
Capturing Reading Processes with
Reading Strategies Lists
Set the purpose for students...
Ask students:
What do skilled science readers do when they read?
Make a list of “Reading Strategies.”
Assign a piece of text to read.
What did you notice? What was hard?
What did you do to make sense of text your read?
Share, revise, revisit...
Modeling and Practicing
Think-Aloud with Science Text
Set the purpose for students...
Demonstrate and model strategies on bookmarks and
checklists: predicting, picturing, summarizing,
questioning, identifying problems, using fix-up strategies.
Students practice with science text.
Pair share.
Revise Reading Strategies List.
Repeat with different paired configurations.
Talking to the Science Text
Set the purpose for students...
Demonstrate on overhead projector.
Students practice with science text.
Pair share.
Revise Reading Strategies List.
Repeat with different paired configurations.
Double-Entry Journals:
What and How?
What do I know?
How do I know it?
Double-Entry Journals:
I saw…I thought...
I saw in the text…
(Evidence/quotes from the text.)
I thought…
(What you thought or
understood as you read.)
Reciprocal Teaching
…we learn best when we teach others
Summarizing: identifying and condensing the most
important points in the text.
Questioning: formulating questions about what you don’t
know, what you need to know, or what you would like to
know.
Clarifying: making sense of confusing text and potential
barriers to comprehension.
Predicting: using information already given in the text to
formulate a guess about where the text “is going.”
Remember...
Reading involves complex, invisible processes.
Making these processes visible helps students
become independent, strategic readers.
Students need to be apprenticed by
content area teachers.
Students are motivated to become strategic
scientific readers and thinkers when they are
active agents in their own learning.
Concept Development
Design a graphic organizer that reflects your
understanding of the relationship between Reading
Apprenticeship and research-validated comprehension
strategies.
How are they the same? Different?
How do they relate to one another?
Tom Clancy once said...
“The world holds no secrets
if you can read.”