Superintendent's Corner

By Shawn Lewis-Lakin
Supreintendent of Manchester Community Schools

As a discrete subject that is taught in the school day, reading typically vanishes in the fifth or sixth grade. Yet, it is in the late elementary and middle school grades when the reading demands in subject area classes (mathematics, science, social studies) increase.
Recognizing the need to respond to this situation, many secondary-level teachers in the Manchester Community School District are now working to improve their ability to assist students to become better readers through participation in a program called Reading Apprenticeship.
Reading Apprenticeship is an approach to reading instruction that helps students develop the knowledge, strategies and dispositions they need to become more powerful readers. It is at heart a partnership of expertise, drawing on what teachers know and do as discipline-based readers, and on students’ unique and often underestimated strengths as learners.
Reading Apprenticeship helps students become better readers by: engaging students in more reading —for recreation as well as for subject-area learning and self-challenge; making the teacher’s discipline-based reading processes and knowledge visible to students; making students’ reading processes, motivations, strategies, knowledge and understandings visible to the teacher and to one another; helping students gain insight into their own reading processes; and helping students develop a repertoire of problem-solving strategies for overcoming obstacles and deepening comprehension of texts from various academic disciplines.
In a Reading Apprenticeship classroom, the curriculum expands to include how we read and why we read in the ways we do, as well as what we read in subject area classes.
The Manchester Community School District has powerful evidence for the impact this strategy is having in classrooms. The Degrees of Reading Power is one device used to measure reading growth. The reading ability of students as measured with the DRP typically grows two DRP units per instructional year (this is the norm or average growth in a year for a national sample of students).
In the Manchester classrooms where teachers are engaged in ongoing Reading Apprenticeship training and support, we are seeing reading growth of seven to 11 DRP units in an instructional year, and increase of 3.5 to 5.5 times the national norm for growth.
Another measure of the success being experienced with this program is found in the senior exit survey data collected from graduating seniors at the high school. Between 2007 and 2008 the number of students who responded positively to questions regarding their experiences of receiving instruction and support in content area reading increased 20 percent.
Students are not only reading better, but are recognizing and appreciating that something significant is changing in what is happening in their classrooms.
Finding new ways to support growth in reading proficiency at the secondary level is but one example of our ongoing efforts to improve the quality of instruction we provide to all students. As we wrestle with budgets and necessary financial restructuring, it is my hope that we not lose sight of our core vision, which is one of providing educational excellence in a caring community. It is both that which we now do and that for which we will continually strive.
Shawn Lewis-Lakin is the superintendent at Manchester Community Schools. He can be reached at slewis-lakin@mcs.k12.mi.us