Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms

Published in Partnership with WestEd

"A breath of fresh air! After reminding us that any teacher who puts a book in front of a student is a reading teacher, the authors give us a teacher-tested reading course for middle and high school students. They avoid the baloney in the present reading debates by paying attention to actual students. What they propose is an apprenticeship in using a tool kit for problem solving in reading. The tool kit itself is a combination of cognitive and social dimensions embedded in subjects. And, lo and behold, they can point to actual results."--Miles Myers, former executive director, National Council of Teachers of English

"Reading for Understanding should be in the hands of teachers, principals, superintAndents, curriculum coordinators, school board members, state educational leaders, university professors, and teachers in training. Engaging, to the point, and grounded in research, this book shares current work in progress, possible stumbling blocks, ideas to overcome them, and specific strategies with detailed examples. Most middle and high school teachers have little or no 'teaching reading' training. It is not too late and this book is a great start."--Judy Cunningham, principal, South Lake Middle School, Irvine, California

Easy to follow and filled with examples of student work and classroom lessons, Reading for Understanding offers a successful approach to helping students improve their literacy across all subject areas. It shows how to create classroom "reading apprenticeships" to help students build reading comprehension skills and relate what they read to a larger knowledge base. It also discusses the strategies and support systems needed to implement and evaluate reading apprenticeship programs throughout the school. The authors describe a program in which an entire freshman class in one urban high school increased its average reading scores by more than two years. Piloted in San Francisco, the groundbreaking Academic Literacy program proved that it was not too late for teachers and students to work together in boosting literacy, engagement, and achievement.

RUTH SCHOENBACH is project director for the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd. For the past twenty-five years, she has worked as a classroom teacher, curriculum developer, and program innovator with a focus on literacy in diverse settings from preschool to adult education. CYNTHIA GREENLEAF is director of research for the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd. For the past fifteen years, she has provided professional support to secondary teachers and studied the impact of classroom innovations on student learning and achievement. She has won several national awards for her research on classroom-based literacy learning. CHRISTINE CZIKO is co-director of the CLLAD Program at UC Berkeley's School of Education, where she works in teacher education. She taught English for twenty-five years in New York City and San Francisco public schools and worked as a teacher consultant for the New York City Writing Project. LORI HURWITZ is a teacher in the English Department at Thurgood Marshall Academic High School in San Francisco and a teacher consultant with the Strategic Literacy Initiative. She teaches Academic Literacy and assists other schools in implementing Academic Literacy courses.