Historical Reading and Writing Apprenticeships for Adolescent Readers: Framing Instruction Within a Disciplinary Cognitive Apprenticeship

• In Event: Innovations in Teaching History: Promoting Historical Learning, Historical Understanding, and the Common Core Standards

Abstract

In the past thirty years, researchers and educators have laid the groundwork for an emphasis on disciplinary thinking and learning in history classrooms (e.g., Lee, 2005). Contrary to popular thought, research demonstrates that such goals are attainable for a wide range of students, including students as young as 5th grade (VanSledright, 2002), students with disabilities (De La Paz, 2005) and English learners (Zwiers, 2006). But such goals are not easy to attain: If students are to achieve the promise of disciplinary literacy, they must learn to think in disciplinary ways and learn discipline-specific ways of reading and writing.

Why? Students do not naturally tend to think like historians (Wineburg, 2001). In reading historical texts, they often focus on the literal meaning of documents and miss intertextual reading strategies that would promote interpretive work (Afflerbach & VanSledright, 2001). Nor do students tend to write as historians do; in one study, students tended to list and arrange facts rather than analyze information (Greene, 2001). Yet, with instruction that emphasizes disciplinary thinking and argument students’ writing can improve in the context of history classrooms (De La Paz, 2005; Monte-Sano, 2008).

Despite the energy focused on disciplinary thinking and writing in the history education research community, many history teachers are not prepared to teach these aspects of the discipline. One reason may be that history teachers are unprepared to teach students how to read and write – whether for basic comprehension and composition skills, or to promote disciplinary literacy. Our work addresses this problem and is based on a field-tested curriculum intervention program that led to improvements in diverse students’ argumentative historical writing and disciplinary thinking (De La Paz, Felton, Monte-Sano, Croninger, 2012).

These reasons provide rationale as to why we have chosen to take a cognitive apprenticeship approach to the teaching of literacy and historical thinking; therefore, our session goes into more depth on what cognitive apprenticeships mean when teaching historical literacy as well as the conceptual underpinnings of our model. In short, we share a powerful means that teachers use to organize the learning environment, and a way to help students to see processes that are involved in complex learning activities (cf. Collins, Brown, and Holum, 1991). The benefits of our approach are that it is designed for students to gain control over their own learning through opportunities for independent practice, and it suggests ways for teachers to give students feedback on their learning attempts. Our cognitive apprenticeship builds on the foundation established by earlier research (e.g., Brown and Campione, 1996; Englert and colleagues, 1991; Harris & Graham, 1992; Lee, 1995; Palinscar & Brown, 1984; Pressley, 1979; and Wong, 1997) in our emphasis on disciplinary ways of reading, thinking, and writing. We do so by providing a systematic means to deliver a series of heuristics that help young and struggling adolescents develop three facets of their thinking: (1) interpreting what a historical writing task requires, (2) evidence-based argumentative reading and reasoning, and (3) self-regulation of reading and writing strategies.

Authors

• Susan De La Paz, University of Maryland

• Chauncey Monte-Sano, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Mark K. Felton, San José State University