Many middle school and high school students have difficulty reading and understanding academic texts, which limits their ability to meet today's high learning standards. This guidebook addresses this quiet but growing crisis. Aimed at content area teachers in secondary schools, the guidebook describes a successful approach to helping students improve their literacy across all subject areas. The guidebook describes a program in which an entire freshman class in one urban high school increased its average reading scores by more than two years--piloted in San Francisco, the groundbreaking Academic Literacy program proved that it was not too late for teachers and students to work together in boosting literacy, engagement, and achievement. Easy to read and filled with classroom lessons and exercises, the guidebook shows teachers how they can create classroom "reading apprenticeships" to help students build reading comprehension skills and relate what they read to a larger knowledge base. It also discusses the strategies and support systems needed to implement and evaluate reading apprenticeship programs throughout a school. The guidebook can be a companion for educators ready to face the challenge of building reading into their content area teaching. Appendixes contain a curriculum overview of the first unit taught in the Academic Literacy course; and a discussion of evaluation instruments used. (NKA)