Publications & Downloads

With examples from science classrooms, Cynthia Greenleaf explains key Reading Apprenticeship approaches that amplify the reciprocal nature of science and literacy instruction as exercises in inquiry. When literacy is properly understood as an investigation to construct meaning with and from texts, science texts, then—with their conceptual and linguistic complexity and multiple representations of ideas in the form of graphs, diagrams, data sets, and so forth—are perfect for stimulating authentic inquiry into the meaning of the ideas being presented.

For diverse secondary students to become increasingly independent, capable, and critical in their thinking, reading, writing, and speaking in varied disciplinary domains and in the complex literacy tasks of daily life, they need learning opportunities that help them develop dispositions, text-based problem-solving capacities, discipline-based literacy practices, and resilient learner identities. In this presentation, Dr. Greenleaf shared the Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework and its research base, focusing on case studies of subject area classrooms and individual student literacy performances to demonstrate the framework and its impact on students’ growth toward engaged academic literacy.

This archived webinar helps teachers tap the social-emotional aspects of learning to reach diverse students: (1) How to engage students in the metacognitive conversations that introduce them to their own intriguing reading and thinking processes; (2) How to give students the learning experiences that build resilience, stamina, confidence, and competence; (3) How to integrate, and therefore accelerate, literacy and subject area learning (in science, history, and English language arts); (4) How the New Haven (CA) Unified School District implemented these strategies, and what teachers and students learned.
Link to the webinar

In this keynote address to the Wisconsin State Reading Association (Milwaukee, February 7, 2013), Cynthia Greenleaf asks her audience to consider the “non-cognitive” tools of agency, persistence, and resilience that students will need to meet new standards and to “turn the tables” on what counts for learning: What was confusing? How did you figure that out?

In this overview of the Strategic Literacy Initiative and Reading Apprenticeship, SLI co-director Cynthia Greenleaf incorporates a particular focus on how Reading Apprenticeship has been successful for promoting subject area literacy for English learners.

In the academic rustling before the emergence of the Common Core, Rafael Heller and Cynthia Greenleaf wrote an important monograph for the Alliance for Excellent Education, calling for discipline-based literacy instruction in secondary school. In this presentation, Heller and Greenleaf lay out their argument, bolstered with examples from the Strategic Literacy Initiative.

Read the related report: Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas: Getting to the Core of Middle and High School Improvement