about the project

The Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) at WestEd is a nationally recognized leader in literacy professional development and research. SLI is best known for developing the Reading Apprenticeship® instructional framework, which is the theoretical foundation for all work conducted by SLI.

Reading Apprenticeship professional development serves educators in middle school, high school, and community college with a research-based and research-validated approach that promotes students' engagement and achievement in subject area literacy.

Three federally funded randomized, controlled studies found that students exposed to Reading Apprenticeship made significant gains in literacy and disciplinary knowledge, and developed more positive academic identities and dispositions toward reading and learning.

SLI researchers regularly contribute to the field of adolescent literacy with publications in professional books and journals, including the American Educational Research Journal, the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and the Handbook of Adolescent Literacy Research.

SLI also publishes directly for teachers, with its updated best-selling book, Reading for Understanding (check out the video below), and articles in publications such as Phi Delta Kappan, English Journal, and Voices from the Middle.

SLI is involved in two federally funded projects. RAISE is a five-year, five-state implementation and study of Reading Apprenticeship that will reach 2,800 high school teachers and over 400,000 students. In the five-year READi project, SLI contributes its expertise in disciplinary literacy to a national consortium investigating the role of evidence-based argumentation for increasing the reading comprehension of students in grades 6–12.

At the community college level, Reading Apprenticeship initiatives are under way at a broad range of campuses. Renton Technical College, in Renton, Washington, for example, has been named an Achieving the Dream Leader College based on the success of its implementation of Reading Apprenticeship.