Reading Apprenticeship
Reading Apprenticeship is a teaching framework that facilitates students' reading comprehension with the help of cooperative learning and higher-order thinking. It is focused on constructing metacognitive skills, which empower the students to be responsible for their own reading processes, and therefore, be able to work with complex texts in different disciplines efficiently.
Reading Apprenticeship, the framework that is constituted of social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge-building components is the base of this article. The social part is where students learn together by talking about the reading material, which is important for the development of a sense of community in the classroom. The personal factor is that it urges students to tell their stories that they were connected to the story about experiences or things that they are read about. The cognitive part is related to finding tools that help to interpret and evaluate readings while the knowledge-building sidegears students to enlist their observations in different disciplines. For instance, in a science class, pupils cooperatively read and explain a sice of a complicated article that discusses climate change.
Reading Apprenticeship is a program that is especially beneficial to learners with different cultural backgrounds as it builds on inclusive practices that suit a variety of learning styles and backgrounds. The framework encourages peer collaboration among the students where they share their strategies and perspectives. This practice positively affects engagement and at the same time, helps different level students to learn from each other. For example, a skilled reader can help a peer who is struggling to understand a difficult part of a text, thus creating a classroom environment in which all students are able to blossom.
Metacognition is the aspect of Reading Apprenticeship that is most crucial because it entails the inner cognitive operations of students as they read. This self-awareness is the basis for learners to keep track of their understanding and implement the respective strategies needed for comprehension enhancement. A good instance would be if the student first identifies the lack of concentration during the reading task but then chooses to re-read or summarize the content as a strategy that helps in understanding what they read better. The reading of the metacognitive skills students become, in addition to that, better readers and furthermore, they become independent students.
A popular Reading Apprenticeship exercise is the think-alouds where teachers display their thinking processes while reading difficult texts. The teacher may, for example, during the reading of a historical document, vocalize his questioning technique about asking why a particular event took place or how it relates to the present-day problems. After having a model, students are persuaded to perform think-alouds in groups, talking about their own interpretations and questions regarding the text. This method not only makes the students' comprehension deeper but also makes them think critically.