Challenges of Scaling Up a Complex Set of Changes in Teaching Practice Across 300 High Schools

• In Event: 61.042 - The Evaluation of Reading Apprenticeship for Improving Secondary Education

Abstract

For teachers to make the kind of deep changes in practice that will enable them to provide students with learning opportunities sufficient to meet new college and career readiness standards in English, science and history, they need to immerse themselves and challenge themselves and each other by engaging in and reflecting on the higher-level kinds of disciplinary literacies the new standards require. These inquiries frequently confront many teachers with ideas about potential changes in their teaching practices, their teaching identities, and their beliefs about students and about the disciplines they teach. Facilitation of these “positive confrontations” that values teachers’ expertise, experience, and varied contexts and beliefs, requires skill and knowledge as nuanced as that involved in highly-skilled classroom teaching.

Transformation of teaching practices that has the power to “stick” requires that these practices—in this case text-based metacognitive inquiry-- become integrated into teachers’ ways of “seeing and hearing their students,” teachers’ ways of thinking about the nature of literacy in their disciplines, and into a ready and flexible repertoire they can incorporate responsively as needed.

The Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework was developed and has been researched, refined and expanded over a 20-year history of working in cycles of iterative development with communities of middle school, high school and community college content-area teachers. Similarly, the RA model for professional development--which combines inquiries into texts, into student reading cases, into classroom cases and multiple opportunities for reflection, connection to classroom practice, and planning—has been developed, tested, and refined over many years.

This paper will first describe the goals and design principles of Reading Apprenticeship professional development. We will then discuss a range of challenges teachers encounter in this process of highly-designed, inquiry-based and pragmatic professional development. We will then outline the overall scale-up design of the i3 program that will impact 600,000 high school students in 300 schools over 5 years. We will finish by discussing some of the key challenges and emerging lessons for us as program developers three years into this 5-year program.

Authors

• Ruth Schoenbach, WestEd

• Cynthia L. Greenleaf, WestEd