As a high school science teacher, Fawn Phillips, who’s been teaching the subject since 1999, said she had never really thought about the problems her students were having with reading—nor did she have the confidence to help them through those problems.
For years, Phillips “did all the heavy lifting for students,” she said. She read the material, broke it down into manageable pieces, and taught content through PowerPoint lectures, without asking students to read on their own or talk through its implications with their peers.
“I was trying to help them,” said Phillips, who teaches in the Clarkston community school district outside Detroit. “But in looking back, I was just enabling kids who didn’t have the ability to read. I was just moving them along and not really helping them.”
Phillips changed her strategies after hearing about and attending a teacher-training program that focuses on helping teachers model—and gets students to begin using—discipline-specific literacy skills. She got rid of her PowerPoints and started helping students work through text. For instance, she started asking her students to “talk to the text,” to “make their thinking visible” on the page: What are they stuck on? What does it remind them of? What do they need to know to make sense of the text?
Over time, Phillips saw her students’ test scores improve, and her students even started asking their other teachers to do the same things she was doing. They enjoyed showing what they were thinking while they were reading, she said.
Now, the program, WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship, has become a districtwide initiative in the Clarkston district.
One of the core findings in the research on how students learn to read is the importance of developing the background knowledge needed to keep learning new content. But what gets more complicated, researchers point out, is that the tools that experts in each discipline use to read begin to evolve differently as the texts get more sophisticated. Scientists, for example, pay a lot of attention to the conclusions of scientific arguments and how they advance or contest other findings, while literary critics spend more time analyzing the craft of a writer’s language.
What it comes down to is that students need an understanding of how to read, write, and reason within each discipline and to understand the different tools experts in those disciplines use. The National Assessment of Educational Progress will begin emphasizing applied literacy as early as 2026, reflecting the importance of reading widely in fields in which texts are crafted differently—and toward different ends.
How to help teachers who aren’t experts in reading instruction
All of that comes against a backdrop of lower levels of reading achievement, according to NAEP and other gauges of student learning.
One perennial problem: getting teachers on board. After all, content-area educators, especially in middle and high schools, typically don’t hold licenses in reading and might not even see teaching reading as a core part of their jobs.
Phillips, for instance, only had one reading-related class in her master’s program, she said, where she learned how to help kids with decoding but not discipline-specific reading or writing. “I thought most of the kids who come to me will have a pretty decent understanding of how to read,” she said.
Now, more teacher-preparation programs are addressing disciplinary literacy in their certification programs for content-area teachers, according to Misty Sailors, a research director for WestEd’s literacy team. But “there are a lot of teachers in the field that came out of prep programs, either university or alternative, before this really took root and was picked up,” Sailors said.
Change for those educators can feel a bit daunting at first, said Mary Stump, the associate director of WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship program.
To get content-area teachers on board, WestEd experts say they start by drawing on teachers’ expertise as readers and writers of their subject area. Science teachers, for example, prioritize inquiry—asking questions, constructing explanations, and communicating their ideas. So, Reading Apprenticeship trainings tap into those strategies. They ask teachers to talk to the text, ask questions, bring background knowledge, and then share their thinking with a partner or in a group.
And teachers also need help with selecting and vetting reading materials to move beyond the limitations of textbooks, especially when it comes to finding text that will be relevant to what they’re studying and be accessible at different reading levels.
Those who have made it a point to teach discipline-specific literacy skills in their classrooms say they’ve seen how much it has benefited students and improved their teaching strategies.
“It took probably until my fifth year of doing it that a student sent me an email from college saying, ‘The strategies that you taught me, the things that we developed, I’m still using in college because it gets a lot harder, and the reading is not easy,’” Phillips said.
The work starts with relationships—and moves to content
The Reading Apprenticeship framework has four dimensions: social, which creates a supportive learning environment; personal, which helps develop an identity as a reader; cognitive, which helps develop problem-solving strategies; and knowledge, which develops an understanding of how texts in different disciplines are put together: their genre, diction, and the way people in those fields communicate.
Educators who have used the WestEd approach emphasize the importance of the first two dimensions before getting to the nitty gritty of content-focused reading comprehension. Phillips starts the school year getting to know her students and what their reading levels are: What do they do for fun? Do they like reading? If so, how much time do they spend reading, and what do they usually read?
From there, it’s easier to get to the text-based problem-solving strategies, such as predicting, questioning, visualizing, and annotating, Stump said.
In each subject, the program puts an emphasis on students thinking aloud and sharing their questions and musings with peers, Stump said. Essentially a form of metacognition, this strategy helps students become aware of their own thinking and access new ways of approaching a text. And in the process, they develop an understanding of what they’re reading, she said.
What makes the approach especially powerful is when all teachers are on board, reinforcing the message across classes, teachers say.
“Reading requires kids to sit in a chair and be off their phones and struggle in silence by themselves. I think the struggle has always been getting them to be comfortable with that process,” said George Vlahakis, a high school social studies teacher for the Rich Township district in Illinois, which has also adopted the Reading Apprenticeship model. “If they’re only doing that in one of their classes, or maybe two, some of them always struggle with that and never get over it. But now that they have to do it in all their classes, I think they’re much more comfortable with that.”
Before the Rich Township district turned to a whole-school approach to disciplinary literacy, Vlahakis said he had already been teaching his students how to read, write, and think like a historian. It used to take him three months to teach freshmen how to read, annotate, and think about a nonfiction text in the way that someone working in the history field would.
But now that students are learning parallel strategies in their other classes, Vlahakis said students are getting comfortable and confident at a faster pace.
The program emphasizes having teachers narrate out loud the strategies they use to make sense of a text so that students can see the thinking behind it. Vlahakis usually starts the school year by reading a short portion of the text out loud to students and letting them hear his thought process as a history expert reading through the text. After a few weeks of modeling the strategy, he turns it over to the students’ to annotate and think out loud as they read a text.
“Just with simple strategies, they’ve gotten pretty comfortable attacking a history reading,” he said.
About 100 districts across the country have been trained in the program’s methods, according to WestEd. Outside of that, it’s unclear how many have a whole-school approach to literacy, even though iterations of it date back to the 1940s.
Teachers who’ve gone through the WestEd program said they’ve not only seen growth in students’ reading and writing skills, but they’ve also seen greater student engagement.
“They’re working together. They’re talking to each other about their learning,” said Helene Boganski, a 9th grade English teacher and a reading specialist for the Rich Township district. “It’s not just the teacher in front teaching. It’s students and teachers working together for their learning.”
How a whole-school approach to reading impacts teacher relationships
One dividend of the whole-school approach to disciplinary literacy has shown up in teachers’ relationships.
Before her school started the WestEd program, Boganski said it felt like the responsibility to get students reading at grade level fell only on the English/language arts teachers.
“Now, we’re all working toward the same goal, using the same strategies, using the same language,” she said.
It has also opened up opportunities for cross-subject collaboration, teachers said. Instead of just working with teachers within their content area, they get to work with teachers in other disciplines and learn new ways to tackle a text.
“Sometimes, when you’re so used to working within your content, that’s the lens that you see everything through,” Boganski said. “But I just had a great conversation with the biology teacher the other day about reading and writing that we would have never had before. It’s opening up the doors to have those conversations.”
To make the whole-school approach work, districts need to invest a lot of time and money and ensure that teachers buy in, teachers said. The district invested in training and gave teachers the time to attend it, Boganski said.
“That helps everybody understand that this is not just a one-and-done,” Boganski said. “Everybody is on board. Everybody wants to see this through.”
But it’s a long process, said Phillips, the science teacher.
“Some things do flop,” she said. “Some things you will do in the classroom, and you’ll feel like that didn’t benefit any of [the students], and you’ll have to restart.
“We’re not looking for perfection. We’re just trying to move the needle in this direction to get [students] to be doing better than we had them do before.”
