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

by Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Christine Cziko

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0787950459
• ISBN13: 9780787950453
• Release Date: December 1999
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.6" x 11.0"
• Age Range: 12 to 18 years
• Grade Range: Grades 7 to 12

Customer Reviews

Informative, thought-provoking, insightful, practical.

Reading For Understanding: A Guide To Improving Reading In Middle And High School Classrooms is the collaborative effort of classroom teachers and education researchers Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Christine Cziko, and Lori Hurwitz. Part One explains the reading apprenticeship approach in which a teacher serves as master reader to the student apprentice. Part Two describes how the reading apprenticeship approach has been put into practice. Part Three discusses ideas for professional development and helping teachers become aware of their won reading skills, acquire a better understanding of the struggles students are experiencing with reading, and prepare for the role of master reader to student apprentice readers. Reading For Understanding is informative, thought-provoking, insightful, and practical reading for student teachers and has much of value for even experienced classroom instructors.

Highly Recommended

(taken from a short review I wrote elsewhere) I measure my appreciation for most books by my need to annotate them, to converse with or argue against the authors in the margins. By this, and many other measures, Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms, written by CATENetters Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Christine Cziko, and Lori Hurwitz, is a remarkable book, one I think can help us all do our work better which is to say to help students do their work better. The book succeeds on several important levels: its summarizes research in concise but useful ways; it describes then illustrates the different reading skills and strategies it emphasizes, all of which are anchored in real classrooms in an urban high school; it provides a professional development component for schools or departments interested in implementing their own reading apprenticeship or academic literacy program; and, finally, it provides a concise but useful appendix that includes the readings and overview of the Academic Literacy class the book studies in great detail. They do all this in 180 pages with huge margins for taking plenty of notes. This book comes to me at the end of my sabbatical during which I have spent much of my time trying to learn about these very issues; oh if only I had read this book four months ago! Instead I just read it now and will return from my sabbatical with a proposal that my school, which is facing the very same challenges they describe in this book, look to this book as a model for what we can and should accomplish with our own students. As a classroom teacher, I really want to thank the authors for writing this book.We got glimpses of it through an article in California English some time back, but now it is just becoming available as a book.