WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship program has been awarded an $8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to improve subject-area literacy at the secondary level, working in partnership with rural districts in North Carolina.

The competitive grant was awarded from the Department’s Education Innovation and Research Program (EIR). The project enables WestEd to extend its award-winning Reading Apprenticeship professional learning to 600 high school teachers in subjects across the curriculum for four school years.

Reading Apprenticeship supports educators in all academic subject areas to improve their teaching of academic reading and writing. The program engages teachers who have expertise in subject areas and helps them mentor students in discipline-specific reading strategies, while also giving them new ways to explicitly support students’ social-emotional learning.

The project will be led by Linda Friedrich, WestEd’s Director of Literacy. “We’re honored to work with educators in North Carolina,” she says.

“Too often programs present teachers with a false dichotomy between academic and social-emotional learning. Reading Apprenticeship engages teachers in integrating their content area learning goals with literacy and social-emotional learning outcomes.”

“Reading Apprenticeship has proven to be a very effective literacy-development approach,” says WestEd CEO Glen Harvey. “We’re excited to share it with more teachers and students, especially those in rural areas who often have less access to evidence-based professional learning.”

Reading Apprenticeship has helped more than one million students from middle school through college to become better readers and thinkers. Twenty-five years of research has documented the positive effects of Reading Apprenticeship. Its effectiveness is rated as “Strong” by EvidenceforESSA.org and it is one of a few high school interventions listed as effective by CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.

Visit the Reading Apprenticeship website to learn more.

Contact for more information:

Sharon Sáez, WestEd
Partnership Development Director
(301) 997-1891
ssaez@wested.org