Interview With the Author: Ruth Schoenbach

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

"Originally, Cyndy and I decided to write this book to share our excitement about students' accelerated reading growth in a course we called Academic Literacy, which we had developed with Christine Cziko, then an English department chair at Thurgood Marshall High School in San Francisco. This course, which focused on increasing ninth-grade students’ reading fluency, comprehension, and engagement, was based on work we were doing together in a teacher researcher collaborative investigating high school reading.

"By the time Cyndy and I enlisted Christine and Lori — who also taught the Academic Literacy course — in the idea of writing a book about the struggles and successes of the Academic Literacy course, we had a much broader set of classrooms to write about. These other classrooms were content classes — history, science, English, and math classes — of middle school and high school teachers who had started working with us using an instructional framework we came to call Reading Apprenticeship®. Data from these other classrooms showed the same kinds of changes in students' reading that had prompted us to write about the Academic Literacy course originally.

"Feeling pretty confident in our general approach, we focused on really wrestling down what we meant by this Reading Apprenticeship framework and how to explain it in a way that would be both theoretically grounded and very accessible.

"We struggled quite a bit with how to create a tone and voice that would speak to teachers’ need for pragmatic solutions, but not be a cookie-cutter approach. There are many books that describe strategies for increasing reading comprehension; we had something quite different in mind. As Lori, who has now joined our staff full time, says, ‘You don’t have to use twenty comprehension strategies, you can use one deep and wide over the year. What Reading Apprenticeship is really about is changing the way teachers and students relate to each other around literacy.’

"It has been wonderful to hear from teachers and teacher educators around the country who pick up the book and feel that it speaks to their reality — that they can use what they read to make changes in how they support students’ reading. Many of them have become new partners in applying and extending Reading Apprenticeship around the country. It's very exciting to meet them in our National Institutes for Reading Apprenticeship, to learn with them, and then to hear what they do with these ideas after they go back home.”

Contact Information

Ruth Schoenbach
510.302.4255
rschoen@wested.org