Co-Director of the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd, Ruth Schoenbach, founded the Strategic Literacy Initiative in 1995 and has nurtured it into a vital force for improving subject area literacy in middle school, high school, and college. Her early work in the San Francisco school system as a teacher, curriculum developer, and humanities and language development project director informs her leadership and contributed to the development of the Reading Apprenticeship Instructional Framework that is the core of all SLI work.