“Students are making connections to the text with strong questioning strategies, and demonstrating much higher levels of understanding.”
—Ricci Ulrich, Principal, Buchanan High School, Clovis, CA

As we mentioned in a blog post last week, WestEd will be at the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) conference later this week in San Diego. Ruth Schoenbach, Co-Director of the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd, will be moderating a panel of two high school principals whose teachers have been trained in Reading Apprenticeship, a research-validated literacy framework that helps secondary school teachers support their students’ literacy while reading subject content.

Ricci Ulrich, Principal of Buchanan High School in Clovis, CA, says that her teachers were well trained in their content areas, but struggled when confronted with students who needed help with reading and comprehension. Ulrich and her staff were intrigued when they learned about new approaches to supporting students in subject area classes with a 10-day Reading Apprenticeship professional development series offered by WestEd.

During the intense but empowering first five days of training, Ulrich and her teachers experienced an “Aha” moment when they read subject material through students’ eyes. This helped them appreciate the Reading Apprenticeship model, which calls for Social, Personal, Cognitive, and Knowledge-building supports that empower the students to more deeply grasp the subject material.

Today, students at Buchanan High School are making connections to the content using reading strategies they’ve learned from their subject teachers, and they’re demonstrating much higher levels of understanding. As one teacher stated, “When viewing our social science text, students are not just seeing pictures, they are reading, thinking and making inferences.”

Hear Principal Ricci Ulrich’s story, and that of her colleague Anna Corral, Principal of Anaheim High School, at NASSP on Saturday, February 21, 8 am in 29 ABCD Room.

Learn more about Reading Apprenticeship’s impact in the classroom.

And be sure to stop by our booth at NASSP.

Follow WestEd activities at NASSP on Twitter @WestEd and use hashtag #NASSP15.