WestEd News
WestEd's Reading Apprenticeship Wins New Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) Grant and Top Score in 2018 Award Program
WestEd is the recipient of an esteemed 2018 Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) grant to improve subject-area literacy nationwide for secondary schools demonstrating a strong need for support.
Awarded by the U.S. Department of Education, the grant enables significant expansion of WestEd’s award-winning Reading Apprenticeship program to more than 1,500 secondary-school teachers across core curriculum areas. The grant will also support development of new resources for science and engineering.
“Reading Apprenticeship is a proven, effective literacy-development approach,” says Glen Harvey, Chief Executive Officer of WestEd. “We’re excited to contribute to increased student learning across the country by substantially expanding access to this program for teachers and their students.”
The project will be managed by Mira Katz and Mary Stump, Associate Directors in the Teacher Development Program for WestEd. “We’re honored to be able to share this evidence-based work with so many educators,” says Katz. “Too often, teachers are told what new standards to achieve without the support they need to shift their own classroom proactively. We want to give them that support.”
WestEd won the top score of the highly competitive 2018 SEED Grant program, ahead of more than a dozen other awardees, and many other applicants, in the most competitive application process in the history of the program. WestEd will work directly with teachers and local partners to serve more than 100,000 new students during the grant period and build local capacity for sustained implementation. “An exciting aspect of this particular project is the opportunity to work with researchers and teachers of science and engineering,” Stump says. “We are eager to create new open-source materials and resources that support inquiry and text-based investigation.”
Reading Apprenticeship is a professional learning framework that prepares educators in all subject areas to guide students in effective reading strategies, develop classroom environments that explicitly support social-emotional learning, and foster persistence with complex academic materials.
Since its launch, Reading Apprenticeship has helped more than one million students in middle school through college, who are striving to become better readers and thinkers. The positive outcomes of Reading Apprenticeship are widely accepted. After dozens of research studies spanning more than 20 years, including three randomized control trials, the effectiveness of Reading Apprenticeship is rated as ‘Strong’ by EvidenceforESSA.org. It is also listed as ‘Effective’ by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL).
Visit ReadingApprenticeship.org to learn more.
Visit innovation.ed.gov for more information about the 2018 SEED Grant awards.
Posted on October 16, 2018