Re: Making It Real: Talking to the Text
By: Danica Fierman

I had the chance to practice Talking to the Text in my RD 90 class yesterday with the first chapter of our class nonfiction book, The Devil’s Highway. One thing that made it somewhat challenging to stay focused on what kinds of thinking steps I wanted to model was that I asked the class to choose the point in the chapter that they found most confusing. That meant that I was not able to reflect ahead of time on what that section of text would permit me to show.

That said, I felt like it made it pretty authentic because I had to read it in front of them, possibly feeling as “unprepared” as they may have as they read it. In addition, I felt like it meant students were more engaged in watching and listening to me because they had chosen that section of text.

Afterwards, one student asked if their annotations/Talking to the Text should look as detailed as mine. I wish that instead of directly answering him, I had asked the class to look at my annotations together and identify specific words/places where I was questioning, figuring out, wondering, predicting…. That way, I could have maybe helped him discover what I was asking for without me saying how “covered with text” his pages should be.

Instead of sitting in a lecture class, her students experience physics through Reading Apprenticeship approaches, including lots of metacognitive conversation, collaborative inquiry, and supported in-class reading. They’re not complaining!

A recent Physics 2B class of 26 students came up with 18 A’s, 4 B’s, 1 C, and 3 withdrawals.

As one student emailed his teacher, “Even from the unorthodox teaching method, I can definitely say I learned a GREAT deal, even more so than a regular lecture/chalk class!”

Lilit Haroyan is on the faculty at Los Angeles Mission College. She taught the Physics 2B class at Pasadena City College.

Pennsylvania teachers report bringing Reading Apprenticeship to their AP courses—with outstanding results. Teachers Sandra Jameson (Nazareth Area High School), Barbara Moss (Abington Heights High School), and Alicia Ross (Blue Ridge High School) all credit Reading Apprenticeship with giving their students a full point or more advantage on the AP exams. Here are some details from Blue Ridge.

Blue Ridge High School is a Title I school that draws 335 students from a 100-square-mile area comprising Pennsylvania State Game Lands Number 35 and State Game Lands 175, for the most part. It’s rural here. Forty-seven percent of students receive free and reduced-price lunch. Seventeen percent take AP exams, and Alicia Ross teaches those students who enroll in AP Macroeconomics and AP U.S. Government and Politics. She’s been learning how to use Reading Apprenticeship to help students in all her courses, but she just received the AP students’ exam scores, so she has some concrete evidence of how it’s going. She’s “over the moon.”

In her second year using Reading Apprenticeship instructional approaches to promote content area literacy, she couldn’t be prouder of her students. “I more fully committed to the Reading Apprenticeship process,” she says, “and it paid big dividends.” Of the 17 students in her two AP courses, for example, most of the students scored 5s. The roll call resulted in ten 5s, four 4s, one 3, and two 2s. One student, who scored a 2 last year in the government course went on this year to receive a 4 in macroeconomics.

“This student has so much grit,” Alicia says, “and this 4 meant the world to him. He messaged me on the day he found out.”

“I’m still sad about the 2s,” she adds, thinking about how to help those students also turn 2s into 4s, but she’s not discouraged. “The amount of both growth and confidence that students in our school have displayed as a result of Reading Apprenticeship has been absolutely stunning.”

It’s the second week of school. Rob Cushman’s non-honors, non-AP biology students have done a little reading and talking about scientific inquiry. They have sampled different genres of science text. They have tried out a couple of partner Think Alouds. Rob has introduced a “metacognitive bookmark,” a reminder of some thinking processes they can use when they read.

On this day, Rob asks students to read in the textbook and keep a two-column metacognitive reading log: “I Saw/I Thought.” Students recognize that this Reading Apprenticeship stuff is unfamiliar territory—weird, even—for learning science. Not too far into the lesson, students challenge their teacher: “Mr. Cushman, How do we know this is working?”

Rob swallows, remembers he’s a science teacher, and says, “How can we find out?”

A student remembers last week’s work about science inquiry. “Data,” she offers.

Rob counters, “What data do we have?”

“Reading logs?”

“What data can we get from our reading logs that will help us answer our question?”

And so Rob asks students to collect themselves into small groups of three or four and come up with some possible answers to the central question: How can we find out?

When Rob calls the class back together, students demonstrate that they have taken up their inquiry as scientists.

“We can use those bookmark categories, like for predicting or making connections.” “Frequency, how often we use them.” “Control.”

“What do you mean, control,” Rob asks.

“Reading a newspaper article is different than reading the textbook or a research article, right? We should just read one kind.”

“Lots of data, so it’s not just a chance thing.”

“How are we going to collect this data,” Rob asks.

“Can we make a graph?”

Rob gets students thinking about what their graph would look like and what data they would need.

During two, at first, and then one reading assignment a week, students individually record on a data table each time they catch themselves using a particular thinking process from the bookmark. Also, on individual graphs, students plot the frequency of all their “thoughts”—averaged per page—over time.

Students’ inquiry enters a new stage when they notice that their use of strategies is taking a dip. “Are we failing at this,” students worry, but then conclude they must be having fewer “thoughts” because their thoughts are becoming more thoughtful! It takes longer.

Rob asks students to predict what’s going to happen next with their thinking. Students sense that like hitting a baseball, they are going to get the swing of it. They do, and their frequency graphs take off. “Exponentially,” Rob grins.

Rob enjoys one last piece to this story. After a while, students notice that their graphs have leveled off. “Why,” they ask, and then realize that the thinking processes they worked long and hard to make visible are becoming so commonplace that they do not always notice them.

Rob Cushman teaches science at Wyomissing Area Junior Senior High School, in Wyomissing, PA.

Manitoba teachers participating in a three-year pilot project that rolled out Reading Apprenticeship in grades 5–12 reported important shifts in their teaching and students’ learning. “I am three weeks behind in my course,” says one high school teacher, “but my students have never learned as much.”   

Another high school teacher reported important changes in students’ confidence and engagement: “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 with speaking out in front of the class. There was a lot of risk-taking that I hadn’t seen before.”   

For a middle school teacher, the difference was in how students gained independence as learners: “I feel much more like an actual teacher.”

Pat Kovalan teaches biology and is learning about Reading Apprenticeship routines and the value of SSR. As a weekend-league soccer player, whose son plays soccer, he found himself making connections between the benefits of “touches on the ball” and “touches on the text.”

“My son has a soccer coach,” Pat explains, “who put out an email saying that every kid gets a thousand touches on the ball in a one-hour practice. He’s kind of a cocky guy, so I said, ‘I’ve got to go see this.’ I went and I actually counted. Every player touched the ball a thousand times and sometimes more. Then when my son comes home or another player comes home, they’re getting even more touches on the ball—they’re volleying the ball off a kick wall, kicking it into the net, juggling the ball—because they’ve found a passion for it.

So in class, if you’re getting kids set up for reading, teaching skills and strategies, giving them lots of practice, they fall in love with SSR and a book. Then they’re going to be reading outside of class, at home—getting a lot of touches on the text. Kind of like my son with his soccer ball.”