When I first came to Mrs. Ryan class, I really didn’t like to read. I guess because no one really pushed me when it came down to reading. As many books as I have read in Mrs. Ryan class, I just think that reading isn’t bad after all. When I use to read and I didn’t really understand it, I use to completely stop. Now when I don’t understand the text, I think. What I like about reading is that there is so many ways to break it down.
—Harlan, grade 9 student
STUDENTS LIKE HARLAN, who used to “completely stop” when he didn’t
understand a text, are not beginning readers. Rather, they are highly inexperienced
readers, especially at making their way through texts that demand ongoing
problem solving—academic texts dense with ideas conveyed through complex
sentences and novel or even technical vocabulary—subject area reading.
When Harlan became a student in Cindy Ryan’s class, for the first time he
was, as he put it, “pushed . . . when it came down to reading.” Her academic
literacy classroom brimmed with books, and her students read a range of disciplinary
texts in history, science, and English language arts along with freechoice
reading. Students read in class and at home. Their class embodied the
features of extensive reading that translate widely: extend students’ opportunities
to read in class, extend the types of subject area texts students are supported
to read, and increase the opportunities for students to choose texts for their own
purposes (both subject area and free-choice texts). The result, from Harlan’s
perspective, was being able to develop the confidence, skills, and stamina to
do the ongoing problem solving that academic text requires. It could even be
said that as a result of his evolving reading competence, close reading to solve
reading problems became pleasurable, not deadly: “What I like about reading,”
he reports at year-end, “is that there is so many ways to break it down.”
Extensive reading, which was Harlan’s experience in Cindy Ryan’s class,
is the “surround” in which Reading Apprenticeship happens and succeeds.
Although the heart of the Reading Apprenticeship classroom is metacognitive
conversation, it is only in the context of extensive reading that students have
the opportunity to accelerate their development as readers and subject area
learners. For students who need to move from being inexperienced to experienced
readers, and from disengaged to engaged learners, there is no way
around it: they must have extensive, supported opportunities to read, in class.
In this chapter we present a rationale and general guidelines for incorporating
extensive reading into subject area classes. By establishing an inquiry culture and
metacognitive routines such as described in Chapters Three and Four, teachers can
confi dently extend students’ opportunities to read complex academic materials.
The Why of Extensive Academic Reading
I wanted students to become the scientifically literate citizens envisioned in the National Science Education Standards: students who read science, enjoy reading science, and even experience the passion I feel for the natural world. However, with 65 percent of incoming freshmen at my school reading below the sixth grade level, it was clear that our science curriculum, especially the textbook, did not include motivating or accessible reading for most students. To bring reading back into our science classrooms, my colleague Ann Akey and I designed yearlong literacy routines and quarterly reading projects that we use successfully with our ninth-grade students, including English language learners.
—Janet Creech, high school science teacher1
Janet Creech and Ann Akey had a disciplinary rationale for introducing
extensive reading into their grade 9 science course: to offer students a future in
which they could read about, understand, and even enjoy science and the natural
world. According to Janet, the literacy routines that now anchor students’
science learning—keeping metacognitive logs of their science textbook reading,
regularly researching self-selected science news reports, and completing
quarterly literacy projects and presentations that incorporate reading sciencebased
books of choice—seem to make an important difference in changing
students’ engagement with science. With extensive reading as the context for
all of students’ science learning, Janet and Ann feel they are able to serve their
disciplinary goals and promote students’ literacy more generally. (Their course
is described in more detail later in this chapter.)
Extensive reading, when practiced strategically and consistently, serves the
goals of subject area learning and makes the following contributions to students’
growth as readers:
• Academic language and subject area knowledge, as well as familiarity with
text structures, genres, vocabulary, and concepts in particular subject areas,
are all promoted through extensive reading.
• Fluency, stamina, and the habit of reading are powerfully boosted through
ongoing and extensive opportunities to read.
• Choice of reading material, which extensive reading makes possible, contributes
greatly to motivation and engagement.
• Work to comprehend academic texts with the collaboration of peers and
with teacher support for modeling and metacognitive conversation helps
students build text-based problem-solving skills and dispositions for
engaged subject area learning. Sharing reading through book talks, presentations,
text-based group discussions, and other public experiences builds
excitement and interest among a community of readers.
• Increased reading experiences help students gain insight about themselves
as readers and about their preferences in reading materials.
By defi nition, extensive reading takes time. Yet the time students actually
spend reading and working to comprehend texts makes the single most important
contribution to their reading achievement and profi ciency.2 Sadly, as teachers
know, the amount of time students spend engaged in reading inside and outside
of school has decreased in recent decades. Reduced reading opportunities means
that students’ reading competence and confi dence both suffer. Without experience
in making sense of academic materials, students will lack familiarity and
stamina when faced with complex texts. Understandably, they will have little
motivation for working their way through diffi cult material. Without access to
the knowledge and academic language conveyed in texts, their ability to comprehend
a greater range of texts will be limited. This in turn often leads teachers
to lower their expectations for students’ reading, thereby continuing the cycle.
Without ongoing and supported reading experiences, students stop growing
as readers and even lose ground. To interrupt this downward spiral, teachers
will need new and more powerful ways to bring reading back into the
curriculum and the classroom.
Jane Wolford, whose community college students enroll in her history
classes with little preparation for the kind of extensive reading that historians
enjoy, decided to help them bear down, take on multiple disciplinary texts, and
perhaps even have some fun. One of Jane’s biggest challenges was students’
reaction to primary sources. By taking the time in class to have students read
closely and think like historians, Jane helped them build the motivation and
skills to tackle and understand challenging text. She describes in Classroom
Close-Up 5.1 what she and her students discovered.
The What of Extensive Academic Reading
In this representation of extensive reading, the teacher and the student have
different but interacting roles. Teachers extend the time in class for reading—and
rereading—academic texts to serve subject area learning goals. By extending
the reading levels of texts, teachers provide differentiated readings as well as a
ladder of increasing challenge. Teachers also extend access to academic texts by
using ancillary topic-related materials to add interest and varied entry points.
Teachers extend students’ choice of what to read through thematically linked
texts or independent reading projects. Creating support for extensive reading,
in terms of the classroom social and personal dimensions and a focus on metacognitive
conversation, allows teachers to extend what they expect of students,
to extend students’ accountability for reading.
When students have more time for subject area reading, they are expected
to extend the volume of reading they accomplish. With the teacher providing
increased access to different levels and types of texts, students extend the range
of what they read. As students read more and more kinds of texts, they extend
their reading stamina. As students extend their stamina for reading longer and
more challenging texts, in combination with extended opportunities to make
choices about their subject area reading, they become more competent readers
and, presumably, more engaged subject area readers.
By extending the opportunities and support for student reading, teachers
see a transformation in the roles they and their students assume. High school
English teacher Lisa Krebs expresses relief that now reading is a class activity
and not only something students are supposed to do for homework. As a result,
her goals have changed from managing and entertaining students to supporting
them in their own reading, thinking, and problem solving:
I think back to when I was early teaching, and I mean, I was doing everything.
They were sitting there, sometimes with nothing on their desks the
whole period. And I’m sort of telling them about the story, and showing
them visual aids, and doing this, and running around, and passing out
[things], and, you know, it was crazy. And they’re probably thinking,
“Doo da doo, I don’t have to do anything.”
When classrooms are places where teachers do things for students or to students,
teachers are doing all of the intellectual work. When classrooms become
places where teachers do things with students, the intellectual culture of the
classroom shifts, and students have a purpose for investing in learning.
The Student Learning Goals for Building Personal Engagement (see the
As sess ment Appendix) make clear to students a number of ways they can
think about extending their reading effort and evolving a more powerful
reader identity.
Extending Time for Reading Disciplinary Texts in Class
As Lisa Krebs just described, teachers often assign reading of curriculum materials
for homework and review them during class, with the result that many
students avoid the reading and simply wait for the review. Depending on the
class, the teacher’s goals, and the time in the school year, bringing reading back
into the classroom may mean any of the following:
• Students spend time reading these materials during class, either individually
or in small groups.
• Students work together in class to make sense of key passages selected by
the teacher from the core text.
• Reading may continue to be assigned for homework, but the class may
work together on making sense of some or all of the assigned reading material
during class time. The teacher may be actively involved but is coaching
and facilitating the meaning-making process without reviewing or summarizing
the text for students.
• Research and reading become an integral part of project-based learning,
with the teacher choosing to spend more time actively engaging and supporting
students’ reading in class, and students spending more time working
on projects as homework.
When students have time in class to uncover text comprehension problems
and work toward solving them with the help of their teacher and peers, teachers
have the opportunity to help students understand key concepts and information
in the curriculum. When students are supported in reading their course
texts, the texts become the resource for accessing subject matter that they are
intended to be.
Early in the year, teachers may want students to spend a high percentage
of class time engaged in reading and debriefi ng their reading of course
materials. When the emphasis on reading disciplinary texts and fi nding
ways to understand them becomes a classroom standard, teachers can
become more selective about which texts or chunks of text to explore as a
class or at length.
Gina Hale made decisions not only about which parts of the grade 7 history
textbook to focus on, but also about how to engage a hugely diverse group of
students in becoming passionate readers of history. She quickly came to appreciate
that by limiting her use of the textbook to standards-based “essentials,”
she had time for students to read other disciplinary texts—carefully chosen
with students’ different needs in mind—that would bring the essentials alive.
(See Classroom Close-Up 5.2.)
Extending Levels and Access for Reading
While course texts are resources for student learning, they also have limitations.
The one-size-fi ts-all reading level of textbooks assumes a more homogeneous
classroom than is often typical. Textbooks also suffer from a lack of specifi cs,
a characteristic fault that has been called “mentioning rather than explaining.”
3 To address such issues, many teachers, such as Gina Hale in Classroom
Close-Up 5.2, supplement their course materials with vertical text sets that
provide a range of entry points and horizontal text sets that provide more
detail or different perspectives about a topic. Many text sets have both vertical
and horizontal characteristics—differentiated reading levels and thematically
related auxiliary texts.
Vertical Text Sets
To address the range of reading abilities in a class, vertical text sets present text
about a particular topic at a range of diffi culty levels. With vertical text sets,
teachers can offer comfortable starting places in the curriculum to students who
have different experiences and profi ciencies as readers. This kind of differentiation
is familiar in the instruction of English learners and in special education.
A vertical text set can serve as a ladder that allows students to progressively
increase their range of reading comfort and their reading profi ciency. At the
same time, of course, by reading easier and then more diffi cult text passages
about the same topic, students begin to build and elaborate subject-specifi c
knowledge and vocabulary. Schema developed from reading a less diffi cult text
are in place to help students in making new connections when reading a related
but more complex text.
A collection of publishers’ competing textbooks can be a valuable resource
for creating vertical text sets. That is what Stacey Tisor realized when she was
on her district’s biology textbook adoption committee:
I was teaching tenth grade biology and my students were at all different
levels. I had some who were honors students—but not in science—I had
general ed students, students well below grade level, and English learners
who were close to being reclassified. The range meant that a single textbook
was not going to work. But fortuitously, I was on the biology
textbook adoption committee. Publishers were sending all these textbooks
for our review, and I realized they were all written at different levels. In
addition to the one we chose for adoption, I found three of the others
that I used to make text sets for particular topics.
Whatever the topic, everyone read the adopted text first, which was written at a level somewhat higher than tenth grade. I set the reading up with an anticipatory guide related to the lesson objective, so students knew what to focus on. With some topics, everyone then got a second text. I put students into small groups, with the text best matched to their reading level. I had one textbook at a college level, another at a “normal” level, and a third that was low middle school/elementary.
For an evolution unit, I asked students when they finished their “leveled”
text to try the next hardest text. Interestingly, it was the students
reading at the lowest levels who were the most motivated to try to move
up to the next level text.
Stacey is no longer in the classroom, but as a professional developer for her school district, she passes along her experience building text sets from textbooks and also shows teachers how to use the Internet to build text sets.
An activity that asks students to explore a vertical text set gives them the metacognitive experience of identifying the factors that make a text diffi cult or accessible, both generally and to them in particular (Box 5.1 lists a number of these factors). The activity, described in Box 5.2, asks students to rank the accessibility of texts, explore the factors contributing to their diffi culty or accessibility, and set goals for moving up the ladder of text diffi culty.
Rita Jensen is able to increase the challenge of the texts her middle school
ELD students tackle with very deliberate attention to the support available
from students’ interest in a topic:
I increase the length and difficulty of the text while keeping the subject very
high interest. What I expect from students increases, but support is built in.
Horizontal Text Sets
Teachers who create horizontal or thematic text sets recognize that different perspectives, supplementary content, and even different genres can be more accessible than a core text—and build schema that make the core text itself
more accessible and meaningful. Horizontal text sets are a widely used way to
build interest, background knowledge, and vocabulary. They can also include
texts differentiated by diffi culty level, combining characteristics of vertical and
horizontal text sets.
In her middle school social studies class, Laurie Erby worried that her students’
textbook chapter about transboundary pollution was not helping them
understand the danger of global hazards like acid rain, water contamination,
and nuclear fallout. To extend her students’ reading, and give them a different
perspective on these environmental issues, Laurie used a text set comprising
interviews with survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. For students,
the interview text structure was familiar and accessible, and the fi rst-person
perspectives made “transboundary pollution” concrete. The interviews had
the additional advantage of varying in diffi culty, depending on the subject and
speaker of the narrative. Laurie describes this particular instance of extensive
reading in Classroom Close-Up 5.3.
English teacher Chris Van Ruiten-Greene’s high school students are required
to read core literature that many of them see as more than a little fusty. She creates
horizontal text sets to build students’ interest in the themes and issues that
a core text raises and to clear away some of their preconceived notions about
the core text’s possible relevance.
With each class, before putting a text set together, Chris invites students
to discuss what they know and what questions they have about the particular
core text. With Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, for example, Chris says
students typically don’t know much about the book except they can see by
the copyright date that it’s “old.” Their questions often focus on their sense
of Africa as “messed up” and their puzzlement about why movement toward
racial equity in South Africa was so long delayed: “Didn’t they protest?” “Who
was their Martin Luther King?” Then, depending on students’ questions and
relevant current events in South Africa and the United States, Chris creates a
thematic text set of what she calls “orbiting” texts. They vary by topic, text type,
and diffi culty, but they are tied together by essential questions the students
raise and a set of themes and potential writing topics that students generate.
For seniors reading Cry, the Beloved Country in my world literature course,
I extend the core reading with varied-difficulty texts for a wider view of
the central themes and issues presented in the text. I choose orbiting texts
to build interest, answer student questions, extend our theme discussions,
and make the core reading relevant to postmodern concerns.
Excerpts from Guns, Germs, and Steel really get them riled up, as
do chapters from Kaffir Boy, racial issue articles from Johannesburg’s
Daily Rand—of which there are a plethora—and excerpts from No More
Strangers Now: Young Voices from a New South Africa. I vary it every year,
depending on students’ questions and what our own American issues are
in parallel to the themes we are considering. Students consistently identify
themes related to the trap of poverty and its toll on human potential
and dignity, the irony of achieving wisdom through enormous loss, and
the shallowness of the perceived ethnic and cultural differences that set
groups of people against each other—at great cost.
Students respond to the orbiting texts with personal reads and logging,
partner discussion, sharing out, becoming a group expert on one
of the Cry themes, and presenting to others on topics from the orbiting
texts—about AIDS or race relations, for example.
The text set makes an enormous impact on their reading of the core text.
They see why this book is still relevant and how it broadens their sense of the
world and equity and raises the complexities of how to get along despite our
differences. The orbiting texts make the “old” story provocative and real. They
spark and fuel classroom discourse because of the issues all students connect to.
Thematic text sets might well include visual texts such as documentaries, photographs,drawings and illustrations, and physical models that extend students’ understanding of text materials and vocabulary as well as the concepts under
study. The same metacognitive routines students use to support their comprehension
of connected text—metacognitive logs, double-entry journals, Talking to the
Text, and Think Aloud—can likewise deepen comprehension of visual texts.
In Classroom Close-Up 5.4, ninth graders in Allie Pitts’s history class read
across a set of propaganda posters, not all of them written in English, to understand
an inquiry question the posters suggest.
Textbooks as Text Sets
Textbooks themselves offer abundant opportunities for extending students’ access and range as readers. A fl ip through the pages of a science, history, math, or English textbook will quickly reveal a variety of text types and ways of representing information. Gina Hale, in Classroom Close-Up 5.2, describes choosing sections of her history textbook for students’ reading based on important content standards that students are expected to master. Teachers can also choose sections of their textbooks for class reading and focused problem solving with an eye toward “easing in” to new topics, conceptually diffi cult territory, or dense academic text.
With a new science chapter, for example, if students fi rst read and Talk to the Text with the visuals, they have an opportunity to build schema for the concepts and terminology they will encounter in the chapter as a whole. Reading the visuals in this way supports students’ next pass through the chapter and their close work with the connected passages of text. In small group or class discussions of the visuals they have read, students can raise questions that provide reasons to read the less immediately appealing portions of the chapter—for instance, to clarify uncertainties, to learn something that has intrigued them, to see how the textbook explains an interesting process they encountered.
Similarly, teachers can choose a particularly telling excerpt of a textbook for close reading and problem solving, ask students to work in pairs or small groups on it, and then bring the class together for further clarifi cation, problem solving, and discussion. By breaking down long passages into manageable segments and supporting students to use Think Aloud, Talking to the Text, and partner and small group discussion to grapple with the chunks, teachers give students considerable experience with academic reading. The textbook used in this way becomes a rich resource for learning, with multiple opportunities for students to read, reread, and work their way through the challenges these texts present.
Community college mathematics teacher Laura Graff uses her textbook as a text set by having students outline chapters. Students take a fi rst pass through with a metacognitive lens: What do I think is important here, how does it relate to other information in the chapter, and how is the text helping me understand?
In Classroom Close-Up 5.5, Laura describes how students learn to use their textbook
as a tool for learning, not simply as a collection of homework problems.
Comparison Text Sets
Another form of thematic text set extends access by inviting students to compare the decisions made by authors and/or publishers. Especially revealing in history and other social sciences where interpretation necessarily varies the presentation of information and events, comparison text sets encourage students to notice differences in how texts relate similar information in different ways, focus attention through choice of photographs or headlines, and emphasize, include, or exclude different details. For example, one textbook’s coverage of women’s suffrage might include a photograph of men supporting the suffragist cause, whereas another might picture only suffragettes. One might describe religion as a factor in how women’s rights and roles were understood; another might instead include information about Frederick Douglass’s support for universal suffrage.
Students will need help making these comparisons. Keeping a log is one
way for them to compare two or three texts: Is one easier to understand?
More interesting? What makes it so? What is the effect of particular decisions
to include or leave out certain information? Teachers also fi nd that it is helpful
for students to refl ect on (1) what they know about a topic before reading,
(2) what they learn from reading a fi rst text on the topic, and (3) what they learn
from reading another text on the same topic. This refl ection allows students to
recognize that their understanding grows the more they read about a topic.
Text + One More
A text set exists any time a topic is presented to students through more than one
text. Minimally, then, adding even one ancillary text to the core text (usually a
textbook) coverage of a topic means more access to the topic. Ideally, if there is
only “one more” text, it is a text that offers immediate access—a photo, map,
quote, short excerpt—for starting to build students’ key conceptual knowledge,
background knowledge, or vocabulary.
Starting small, with Text + One More, can be a worthy goal for teachers who
want to experiment with text sets. (Fair warning: Text + One More has been
known to morph into Text + Two More, Text + Three More, and so on. Building
text sets is just like that.)
Inquiry Questions for Reading Across Texts
When students read across texts, inquiry questions serve an important role of
increasing students’ access to the key ideas and implicit relationships that have
caused the texts to be put together in the fi rst place.
The ninth graders reading a set of propaganda posters in Classroom
Close-Up 5.4 were guided by the inquiry question “How did countries use national pride to convince men to join the war?” The inquiry question provided
a purpose for reading and let students know how to focus their attention.
Chris Van Ruiten-Greene’s high school seniors generate their own inquiry
questions for a unit in which Cry, the Beloved Country is the core text. The questions
they come up with are deeply thematic in nature: How does poverty trap
and diminish people? Why do superfi cial differences between groups of people
take on such import? How can loss produce wisdom?
The seventh graders in Lisa Rizzo’s honors English class warm up for
a lesson that entails comparing two poems with an inquiry framework that
focuses them on the distinctive ways poetry communicates. Students write to
the prompt “Writers might use poetry to speak to readers in a different way
because _____.” They then read the poems, primed to recognize and compare
the poets’ use of fi gurative language. Classroom Close-Up 5.6 drops in on a
group of four students working collaboratively to understand the poems and
also how the poets “speak to readers.”
Extending Choice of Reading Material
Giving students some choice of reading material, even if limited, can help motivate
them not only to read texts they are able to choose for themselves, but also
to return to required course materials with more schema and more interest.
As described earlier, Chris Van Ruiten-Greene creates horizontal text sets
that support students’ reading of a core text and allow for a certain amount
of student choice: in addition to the core text and certain “orbiting” texts that
all students read, students choose, from among optional orbiting texts, those
that will support them in becoming a group’s “expert” on a particular topic or
making a presentation to the class about a self-selected thematic interest. Other
ways in which teachers extend choice of reading materials include subject area
sustained silent reading and projects.
Subject Area Sustained Silent Reading (SSR)
SSR time has not traditionally been a part of subject area classrooms, but this
is another way to provide students with multiple texts and extensive reading
opportunities (see also Chapter Six for a more extended discussion of sustained
silent reading).
Many subject area teachers use particular activities at the start of the class
period to quiet and focus students. Sustained silent reading of topic-related
materials students have chosen can become one of these regular activities. To
the extent that these texts are linked to curriculum units, students are learning
the content while also reading more widely and extensively in the subject
area. To link the reading even more explicitly to the curriculum, teachers may occasionally facilitate conversations about what students are learning, or they
may ask students to keep reading logs that address particular questions.
If teachers have classroom libraries with a variety of texts linked to curriculum
topics, SSR can become part of any subject area class. High school biology
and biotechnology teacher Ericka Senegar-Mitchell has created a set of eight
classroom mini-libraries that she rotates with each new biology unit. She displays
her collections of journals, magazines, brochures, fl yers, pamphlets, posters,
and books (which she continually adds to) on two tables, one inside each of her
two classroom doors. “Buffet tables,” she calls them, and the metaphor is apt.
Anything on the tables is available for consumption. The buffet is popular grazing
before class, and students can have or check out whatever they choose. “With the
right connection,” Ericka explains, “they will read.” In Classroom Close-Up 5.7,
Ericka describes how she maintains her buffet tables and how students use them.
To promote extensive reading in U.S. history and American literature, teachers
in Dixon High School’s history and English departments enlisted the help
of the school librarian and put together a collection of leveled books that support
their combined course content. Students, including English learners and
mainstreamed special needs students, chose books from the list to read during
a daily twenty-minute SSR period that alternated weekly between students’
history and English classes. Teachers of both courses read and responded to
parts of students’ metacognitive reading logs.
High school geometry and algebra teacher Teri Ryan, who loves to read
about as well as play with numbers, has put together an extra-credit book list
for her students. Her list of titles ranges from bestsellers about mathematics and
mathematicians to math-related titles that are accessible to the English learners
and inexperienced readers in her diverse classes. For example, her geometry
students love Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Teri reports. She alerts them to
enjoy the many examples of similarity, congruence, and logic that relieve Alice
from an afternoon in the doldrums.
Literature Circles and Book Groups
The rationale and processes that apply to “literature circles” in English
courses apply to “book groups” in any subject area. College teachers as well
as secondary teachers can use book groups for increasing students’ choice
of reading material, building engagement, and promoting students’ independence
as readers. As with adult “recreational” book groups, members
are expected to meet deadlines and to bring their questions and ideas to the
group. In student book groups, members also keep individual metacognitive
reading logs.
Some teachers hesitate to try book groups because the logistics can
seem intimidating, but as high school teacher Lisa Morehouse discovered,
“Literature circles don’t have to drive teachers crazy.” After two years of
teaching an ethnic literature class, Lisa decided to devote the last nine
weeks of her course to literature circles. She was encouraged by the experiences
other Reading Apprenticeship teachers reported, and a few additional
motivators helped her past an initial fear that having four or five different
novels being read simultaneously by small groups would be difficult
to manage:
• My students’ reading levels differed widely (grades 3–11).
• My school lacked class sets of novels for my course.
• I wanted my ninth graders to take more responsibility for their own
education.
• I was given a free box of book sets for literature circles!
Because student choice is a key feature of book groups, a major consideration
is whether students will feel that they actually have a choice to make. For
this reason, teachers work hard to fi nd a selection of books that vary in reading
level and have potential appeal for different groups of students.
Teachers can launch students’ book selection process by presenting a
quick teaser about each book followed by students’ hands-on preview of the
different choices. Students might use the “book pass” activity described in Chapter Six and then return to read a few pages from the books that seem
most appealing.
In her literature class, Lisa Morehouse asked students to make an initial
prediction about the book from its title, read for a few pages, and then respond
to a set of questions. Students can use the same process to preview two or three
titles before settling on one:
• After reading these pages, what do you think this book will be about?
• Pick a character introduced to you in these pages. Describe this character
and what you think of him or her.
• Write at least three questions you have about the book so far.
• What is your first impression of the book?
The expectation is that teachers will have enough copies of popular titles so
that all students can read their fi rst- or second-choice book.
In Lisa’s class, after students made their book selections and formed their
literature circles, she gave each group a calendar on which she had indicated
what days they would be able to read their books in class and the fi nal due date.
Groups set their own intermediate deadlines, and all group members signed
the calendar as if it were a contract.
In Rita Jensen’s middle school ELD class, students’ sense of responsibility
to the group is refl ected in a log kept by one eighth-grader whom Rita
feels was helped enormously by the social contract she entered into with her
peers. Evidence to this effect, from her metacognitve reading log, appears in
Classroom Close-Up 5.8.
In addition to checking students’ individual metacognitive reading logs,
teachers often ask literature circle groups to make connections from their book
to essential questions that the whole class has been investigating, create a group
book poster, stage a dramatic moment from the text, compare characters across
texts they have read, and take part in other group projects in which each member
of the group has a clear role and responsibility. Luke Boyd’s grade 9 English
students put their Facebook skills to work:
Students in a literature circle each create a Facebook page for a different
character in their novel. The project is designed to capture that character’s
personality in an online profile. Students have to infer how the character
would present himself or herself. What kind of music would that person
listen to? What books would he or she read? What Facebook groups
would that character be interested in?
Then the characters “friend” each other and post messages related to
the plot on each other’s pages, in language directly from the novel or in
plausible words the student puts in the character’s mouth. To review students’
work, I can go online or have them turn in screen shots.
One note: It is a good idea to put “fictional character _______” or
“_______ from (name of novel)” as the name of the page. That way there
is no confusion about the purpose of the page. When students complete
their novel, the page is taken down.
Independent Projects
As a way to support choice and extensive reading, independent as well as group
projects are a great boon. Teachers often fi nd that when they shift more of the
reading of course materials from at home to in class, independent projects are
a good homework option.
In Chris Van Ruiten-Greene’s high school English classes, in addition to
reading the core curriculum and the horizontal text sets that support and
extend the literature classics, Chris’s students complete quarterly free-choice
books and make presentations about them to the class:
Everybody has to commit to a choice book once a quarter. Students are
choosing their own interest avenue and that’s a big deal. They have to
present what they have been reading, what is floating their boat personally.
They look forward to that.
Projects based on books that students choose and read independently
anchor the science curriculum that Janet Creech and Ann Akey designed for
their ninth grade science course. Students routinely read the textbook and
keep metacognitive logs, but the curriculum also provides two streams of
choice: (1) students complete monthly “Science in the News” reports about
current science articles they fi nd in print and online newspapers and magazines,
and (2) they complete quarterly science book projects about science
books they choose from a wide selection (see Box 5.3 for a schematic of
the curriculum).
“Science in the News” involves students in fi nding news reports in newspapers,
magazines, or journals that describe scientifi c issues or research of
interest to them. They work individually to create structured reports about their
articles, then discuss them in small groups. In Classroom Close-Up 5.9, Janet
describes initial challenges students had with the assignment and how they
were resolved. (The assignment itself appears in Box 5.4.)
For the book projects that Janet’s and Ann’s students complete, their
teachers have set parameters for the type of project students undertake
each quarter, but book choice belongs to the students. During one quarter,
students each become a science topic expert and then use their expertise to
write a children’s book. Another quarter, projects focus on science biographies,
and students make class presentations in the guise of their selected
scientist. The last project of the year involves students in literature circles in
which group members have chosen the same piece of science-based fi ction
to read and discuss. Janet explains the three types of projects in Classroom
Close-Up 5.10.
Janet and Ann did not expect their students to be able to complete these
long-term projects without support and intermediate deadlines. Students had
weekly written assignments that included metacognitive and factual notes
about what they were learning. The form that students completed appears in
Box 5.5.
Extending Support and Accountability
When core texts are challenging, sometimes teachers resort to reading aloud
from these texts to the class or having students take turns reading aloud, to
ensure that students are able to access the material. Reading for students sometimes
becomes comprehending for students, as well, because teachers naturally
want to make sure students understand the materials being read to them.
Building students’ independence as readers and learners means teachers must
fi nd ways to engage students in doing the work of reading and comprehending
for themselves.
Sometimes this begins with uncoupling students from their dependence
on the teacher for understanding task directions. For example, science teachers
may ask students to Talk to the Text of their lab instructions and clarify any
areas of confusion with their lab partners. The result, teachers report, is not only
fewer questions about instructions but better labs. In her history classes, Gayle
Cribb realized something similar:
One day after I had passed out written directions for a task, but students
still didn’t know what to do, it occurred to me that no one actually had
to read the directions if I also explained them. That’s when I decided to
retrain all of us about the value of reading and understanding directions.
Our new routine was for students to read the directions, clarify them with
a partner, and then ask the class for help if they still didn’t understand.
Students who are less comfortable reading and had simply avoided
what they thought of as “unnecessary” reading got important practice
in this basic life skill. Students who formerly didn’t pay attention to the
reading because they knew I would explain began to take more responsibility.
I was a little surprised to see, after the first couple of times we practiced
this routine, how extremely efficient it was. It became the default
practice in all my classes, including in my Spanish classes, where students
were reading in their second or third language. It worked!
Support for extended reading that results in a savings in class time—as it
can in the case of support for reading directions—is unusual. More often, support
for extended reading requires a hard decision about what class time is for.
Community college English teacher Missie Meeks found that when she introduced
the scaffolds of having students Talk to the Text and keep metacognitive
logs, it made a huge improvement in her students’ success at writing research
papers. But students also needed extra time to read in these metacognitive
ways. In Classroom Close-Up 5.11, Missie describes how she decided to give
over some of her class time to ensure that students would have the extra reading
time they needed.
Helping students accept a shift in responsibility for reading is the focus
of much of the content of this book. As already described, extending teacher
support for reading includes, for example, providing text sets that include
easier initial entry points or selecting segments of the text to work on as a
class, reciprocal modeling through Think Aloud and Talking to the Text, breaking
long passages down into manageable segments, partner and small group
work to problem solve, and writing to learn through metacognitive logs and
double-entry journals. Such practices, especially as they interact, represent the
extended support that students need.
If students are to value this support, they must see course reading as central
to the curriculum. Their assignments must signal the importance and value of
reading by requiring students to do something public with their reading. When
students are accountable to each other for their reading and preparation,
when they need to read in order to complete an individual project, when they
need to rely on one another’s reading for joint projects and performances, when
teachers collect and respond to reading logs and other evidence of student reading,
reading is clearly important in the class and curriculum.
Similarly, to give reading a more prominent place in the curriculum, reading
experiences and assignments should contribute to assessments of student
learning. Because students have learned to value and give priority to the
aspects of their course work that contribute to grades and other recognitions
of achievement, reading work needs to count. When students set and reach
their academic reading goals by reading course materials, their efforts should
be recognized. Metacognitive logs and refl ections that accompany course readings
should contribute to course grades. In Will Brown’s high school chemistry
classes, students know exactly how their metacognitive logs (he calls them
Refl ective Reading Logs) will contribute to their grade. They each receive a
rubric that spells it out (see Box 5.6).
A classroom culture that explicitly values reading as part of subject area
learning will necessarily incorporate extensive reading. As Janet Creech reports,
when she and Ann Akey redesigned their science course, they reevaluated what
they wanted for their students:
Our goals . . . were to improve student’s attitudes toward science reading
and give students the tools to become lifelong science readers . . .
By the end of the school year, reading becomes an established routine in
my classroom, and students’ attitudes about reading change dramatically.
When I announce the first book project in the fall, the general response
is “What, we have to read the whole book?” By the time the last project
rolls around in late spring, students say, “Read another book? Okay, I can
do that.”
Janet and Ann have extended time, access, choice, and support and accountability
for reading in their science classrooms. Their students reciprocate,
extending their reading volume, range, stamina, and engagement. A program
of consistent, strategic extensive reading more than earns its keep.
Additional information about extensive reading—specifi cally a program of
free-choice sustained silent reading—appears in Chapter Six; it describes SSR
as an important component of an academic literacy course.
Chapter Seven moves on to high-leverage cognitive reading strategies that,
in the context of extensive reading and ongoing metacognitive conversation,
help students hone their reading problem-solving skills.
Notes
1. This and following excerpts describing Janet Creech and Ann Akey’s grade 9 science course
are from Creech, J., & Hale, G. (2006, February), Literacy in science: A natural fi t, The Science
Teacher, pp. 22–27. Reprinted/adapted with permission from The Science Teacher, a journal
for high school science educators published by the National Science Teachers Association
(www.nsta.org).
2. Kuhn, M. R., & Stahl, S. A. (2003). Fluency: A review of developmental and remedial practices.
Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(1), 3–21.
3. Anderson, T. H., & Armbruster, B. B. (1984). Content area textbooks. In R. C. Anderson,
J. Osborn, & R. J. Tierney (Eds.), Learning to read in American schools (pp. 193–224). Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
4. Walqui, A., & van Lier, L. (2010). Scaffolding the academic success of adolescent English language
learners: A pedagogy of promise. San Francisco: WestEd.
5. All excerpts in quotations are from Laurie Erby’s description of using Reading Apprenticeship
routines as presented on the U.S. Department of Education’s “Doing What Works”
website: http://dww.ed.gov/Adolescent-Literacy/Engaging-Text-Discussion/see/index
.cfm?T_ID=23&P_ID=61&c1=1083&c2=1070#cluster-1
6. These compiled excerpts are from Laura Graff’s discussion of her textbook outlining assignment
on the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching website Strengthening
Pre-Collegiate Education in Community Colleges, in the pages “Outlining Mathematics”: http://
www.cfkeep.org/html/stitch.php?s=14832740290866&id=34947815104339
7. Creech & Hale, Literacy in science (see note 1).
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
Schoenbach, R. Greenleaf, C. Murphy, L., Cziko, C. & Hurwitz, L. (2012). Reading for understanding: How reading apprenticeship improves disciplinary learning in secondary and college classrooms. Retrieved from eBook Central (accessed through LIRN). If you are having trouble accessing eBook Central resources, please review the instructions: Finding a chapter in eBook Central Academic.
- Read pages 135-166 which explain some of the background information on the importance of academic reading in addition to strategies for using and choosing texts.