Reading Apprenticeship

Reading Apprenticeship® Online for Community College Instructors

Who Should Participate

This 30-hour, 6-week online learning experience is geared toward currently practicing community college instructors from across the disciplines and is appropriate for instructors focusing on any subject area or level. There are no prerequisites for enrollment.

Key Ideas

Reading Apprenticeship professional development helps instructors to understand the ways in which they, as disciplinary experts, can "apprentice" students into proficient academic reading in their subject area. This course will teach instructors:

• how to think beyond their "expert blind spot" to uncover the strategies they bring to disciplinary reading tasks in order to scaffold these strategies for students
• how to introduce and sustain metacognitive conversation in their classes
• how to recognize and work with students' strengths as readers
• how to bring an inquiry lens to their own instructional practices.

Classroom tryouts and debriefs of key routines are integral to the course, providing instructors with concrete practice and close feedback.

How Students Benefit

Based on data and observations collected from over 200 community college instructors over the past five years, Reading Apprenticeship has been seen to have the following impact on student success:

• Increased retention and course completion
• Increased depth in reading comprehension and written work
• Increased willingness to persist through difficult texts

Sign up for an online course to begin in January of 2013. For more information contact Michele Lesmeister at mlesmeister@RTC.edu