Cynthia Greenleaf, Strategic Literacy Initiative’s Co-Founder and Senior Research Scientist, received the Distinguished Scholars Award from the National Council on Research in Language and Literacy (NCRLL). This award honors scholars who are members of NCRLL and whose work has made major contributions to language and literacy research.

With extensive experience in powerful teacher professional learning and adolescent literacy, Greenleaf is a passionate advocate for high-quality literacy education for all. For more than 20 years, her work with colleague Ruth Schoenbach of creating, developing, and bringing to scale the Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework has improved teaching and learning for hundreds of thousands of secondary and college students and their teachers. Three large-scale randomized controlled studies of Reading Apprenticeship validated its effectiveness in improving students’ subject area engagement, literacy, and achievement.

Greenleaf has published major research papers, won highly competitive grants, authored peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and co-authored the best-selling Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms. In addition to becoming 2019’s NCRLL Distinguished Scholar, Greenleaf’s work in language and literacy has received acknowledgments and recognition from the American Educational Research Association; the University of California, Berkeley; and the National Council of Teachers of English.

NCRLL is a professional organization dedicated to language and literacy scholarship that promotes discussion of new theoretical framings, logics-of-inquiry, and methodologies. It also provides mentorship opportunities to new scholars in language and literacy research, and recognizes excellence through rigorous, evidence-based inquiry by individual members of the NCRLL.

Visit Reading Apprenticeship’s page to learn more.