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Literacy Professional Development
Building Capacity for the Responsive Teaching of Reading in the Academic Disciplines
Strategic Inquiry Designs for Middle and High School Teachers’ Professional Development
At the secondary level, many teachers’ assumptions about reading get in the way of supporting students to read—and understand—subject area texts:
- These kids just can’t, or don’t, or won’t read.
- I don’t know anything about teaching reading.
- Besides, teaching reading is not my job.
This chapter describes how the Reading Apprenticeship approach to professional development helps subject area teachers rethink their assumptions, engage students more deeply in reading, and help students develop new identities as capable, academic readers.
By engaging in a variety of inquiries into their own and students’ reading practices, secondary teachers construct richer and more complex theories of reading, see their students’ capacities to read and learn in new and more generous ways, and draw on and develop their own resources to leverage for students their own expertise as disciplinary readers.
Cynthia Greenleaf, Ruth Schoenbach
Improving Reading Achievement Through Professional Development, edited by Dorothy Strickland, Michael Kamil
Trade paper: $19.98, 240 pages, Christopher-Gordon, 2004
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