Apprenticing Adolescents

     I read the article Apprenticing Adolescents to Reading in Subject-Area Classrooms and I found it to be very insightful. Although I’d never read about it prior to this article, the Reading Apprenticeship framework sounds like a relevant solution for a generation of students who are becoming increasingly disinterested in reading and who are having to do less of it in general. The program focuses on building connections between the students’ prior knowledge and text across all subjects. The key to unlocking proficiency in students is not to give them hours and hours of assigned reading from a textbook, but instead to let them use literature to allow them to realize the uniqueness of their own thought process and make the subject relevant to them. 


        The focus group of instructors who employ the program in their curriculum allow their students to feel a sense of autonomy over the text they’re assigned to read and analyze. I was impressed with the methods of Lisa Krebs and Willard Browns who encourage their students to freely interpret fiction amongst themselves and record their original thoughts alongside a piece of scientific text, respectively. 


        I didn’t fully appreciate the effectiveness of this program until I read a quote from a student on page 6, “ ‘A big thing that changed for me this year was with history… You know, in this class you keep stopping to summarize as you go along, make connections, visualize what you’re reading, and all that, so after a while, it hits you, this stuff really happened.’ ”


        I’ve made this realization throughout primary and secondary school. I’ve found that in order to achieve mastery in any subject and be able to utilize it as a skill, you have to be willing to think critically and see yourself as a part of the content. It’s a teacher’s responsibility to ensure that their students undergo a transformative experience where they see themselves as the subject. 


Comments

  1. Maya ViraOctober 4, 2024 at 1:07 PM

    Hi Colum,

    I find it interesting that you made the connection that mastery in a subject comes from immersing yourself in the material. This is something that I have never thought about, but it makes sense after reading the article and your post. The quote you provided was very meaningful because it showed that for history, you first learn about all the facts and what happened, but the deeper you go into it, the more you start realizing that this is real and not just a fictitious story. For stories that are fiction, it is also important to immerse yourself and fully imagine yourself in the story. I feel that all of us do this because once we are engrossed in the reading and are thinking about ourselves in the setting, we can comprehend the material better. This makes reading a text seem less daunting because we are imagining ourselves there and, therefore, able to take in the content more efficiently.

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