Reading Apprenticeship

Sustained Professional Learning and Leadership in Manitoba

Teachers apprentice students to become motivated, strategic, and critical readers, writers, and thinkers — not just in English language arts class, but in every subject area.

Doing Literacy DifferentlyStudents attain the literacy competencies, subject area knowledge, and the learner dispositions they need — for school, post-secondary, careers, and life.

Reading Apprenticeship works in combination with any curriculum to teach students to successfully engage with academic texts and knowledge in specific subject areas. Reading Apprenticeship’s focus on intensive and ongoing professional learning and inquiry empowers teachers to learn how to apprentice students in the valued ways of reading and thinking in their subject areas.

Teachers experiment with ways to support and build students’ identities as learners who can solve problems and persevere; they create classrooms in which students become more willing to take academic risks and develop, as a result, into more resilient, strategic, and engaged learners.

These goals for apprenticing students into specialized ways of reading and thinking may require a distinct shift in teaching practices. Instead of lecturing or summarizing content for students, science teachers model and guide students in analyzing data sets to justify explanations of phenomena, while students in social studies collaboratively discuss, compare, and contextualize primary and secondary sources to interpret events in history. In such classrooms, students grapple with texts, question information, solve problems, and construct arguments. Teachers help students develop the skills, acquire the strategies, and gain the knowledge they need. When literacy learning and subject area learning are integrated, students build deeper subject area knowledge and are better able to apply it in multiple contexts. The Reading Apprenticeship approach to teaching can accelerate students’ academic success (see <readingapprenticeship.org> for more information).

What the Data ShowsData from a three-year pilot project in Manitoba suggests that Reading Apprenticeship can produce a dramatic, positive transformation of students’ engagement and achievement and teachers’ practice.

■ statistically significant gains in reading achievement overall

■ growth in student confidence, engagement, and abilities

■ growth in teacher and leader confidence and capacity

■ increased teacher engagement and efficacy

■ increased collaboration among educators

Developing a Culture of Literacy in ManitobaReading apprenticeship is a sustained, job-embedded approach to developing a province-wide, division-wide, and school-wide culture of literacy.

Provincial Implementation: A Multi-pronged ApproachAfter a valuable three-year pilot project of Reading Apprenticeship, Manitoba is currently the first and only jurisdiction in Canada to move forward with and deepen this approach to literacy teaching and learning. School division and school teams (made up of a variety of administrators, consultants, literacy coaches and leaders, resource teachers, teacher-librarians, and classroom teachers from across subject areas) are participating in this ongoing project. Manitoba Education and Advanced Learning provides these teams access to free training, resources, and supports through three parallel and connected models of implementation.

Three-Year Intensive ImplementationManitoba Education and Advanced Learning and six partner school divisions are committed to three years of intensive focus in Reading Apprenticeship. This includes the following:

■ five days of focused teacher training per year

■ two to three days of focused leadership training per year

■ monthly site-based professional learning opportunities

■ responsive and ongoing coaching and mentoring in schools

■ responsive and ongoing classroom observations and debriefs

■ materials and resources

■ supports for collecting and analyzing student data

Yearly 3 + 2 Day InstitutesSchool teams from across the province can participate in Reading Apprenticeship professional learning through the yearly 3 + 2 Day Institute. Institutes provide

■ five days of school team training

■ protocols and processes to support local inquiry and professional conversation

■ materials and resources

Pilot school divisions continue to loop new school teams, new teachers, and new leaders into the 3 + 2 Day Institute and Leadership Training.

Leadership Training Growth in teacher practice and student learning can only occur when there is shared vision and distributed leadership within the province, school divisions, and schools. Leadership training provides

■ two days of focused leadership training per year for school division and school teams from all three implementation models.

■ focused supports for school administrators

■ supports for coaching, mentoring, and analyzing student data

What Manitoba Educators Are Saying

With careful planning and support for teachers, students in classrooms where teachers are practising Reading Apprenticeship are experiencing real growth in their capacity to think, inquire, solve problems, and participate in meaningful disciplinary discourse. I think Reading Apprenticeship is key to quality classroom instruction across all disciplines.

–Assistant Superintendent

Lots of people struggle with the idea of spending time or “wasting” time teaching reading, but when teachers take the time with students to uncover the ways of reading and thinking in their subject areas, the acceleration and depth of learning is incredible.

– Middle Years Teacher

I did a lot of “getting to know each other” with the students and really trying to build an atmosphere of reading right from the start. One thing I really observed over time was that students became very close as a class. They became much more at ease speaking out in front of the class. There was a lot of risk-taking that I hadn’t seen in classes before.

– High School Science Teacher

This brochure will be available in French and online at <www.edu.gov.mb.ca/k12/istp/index.html>.

© 2015