Reading Apprenticeship in High School Biology

Reading Apprenticeship (RA) is a professional development program designed to help high school biology teachers integrate academic literacy instruction with biology coursework. The intervention involves 10 days of professional development (5 days in summer 2005, 2 follow-up days during the 2005-2006 school year, and 3 days in summer 2006) where teachers learn to integrate metacognitive inquiry into ongoing biology instruction. The approach makes explicit the tacit reasoning processes, strategies, and discourse rules that shape successful readers' and writers' work in science. Teachers learn to engage students in extensive reading, integrate explicit teaching of comprehension strategies, establish relevance and personal connections to reading materials, identify and use text structures to support comprehension, and support collaborative sense-making activities with written materials. The central dynamic is routine metacognitive conversation—talking about the reasoning and problem-solving processes that accompany reading as students carry out learning tasks in the biology curriculum. Teachers receive stipends for participation, travel expenses, and up to $200 for supplemental reading materials (science magazines, trade books, fiction, and non-fiction selections linked to biology topics).