Reciprocal Teaching A Powerful Reading Strategy

What is Reciprocal Teaching? Reciprocal Teaching is an instructional strategy for teaching strategic reading developed by Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar that takes place in the form of a dialogue between teachers and students. In this dialogue the teacher and students take turns assuming the role of teacher in leading the dialogue about a passage of text. Four strategies are used by the group members in the dialogue: summarizing, question generating, clarifying, and predicting. At the start the adult teacher is principally responsible for initiating and sustaining the dialogue through modelling and thinking out loud. As students acquire more practice with the dialogue, the teacher consciously imparts responsibility for the dialogue to the students, while becoming a coach to provide evaluative information and to prompt for more and higher levels of participation.

What is Reciprocal Teaching? A reading comprehension technique Teacher and students take turns leading a dialogue concerning sections of a text. Includes four activities –Prediction –Questioning –Summarizing –Clarifying

Students are checking their own understanding of the material they have encountered. They do this by generating questions and summarizing. Expert scaffolding is essential for cognitive development as students move from spectator to performer after repeated modeling by adults. Why is it important for students to design their own questions?

Purpose is to help students, with or without a teacher present, actively bring meaning to the written word. Strategies not only promote reading comprehension but also provide opportunities for students to learn to monitor their own learning and thinking. How will Reciprocal Teaching benefit students?

Structure of the dialogue and interactions of the group members require that all students participate and foster new relationships between students of different ability levels. How will Reciprocal Teaching benefit students?

It has proved to be useful with a widely diverse population of students. The RT procedure was designed to improve the reading comprehension ability of students who were adequate decoders but had poor comprehension. Which students will benefit the most from this strategy?

Modifications have been used to teach students who were poor decoders, second language learners or non-readers. Poor decoders used the procedure as a read-along activity, second language learners used it to practice developing skills while non-readers learned it as a listening comprehension activity. Which students will benefit the most from this strategy?

Teachers have observed that even above average students profit because it allows them to read and understand more challenging texts. Which students will benefit the most from this strategy?

Students with more experience and confidence help other students in their group to decode and understand what is being read; students with more experience in questioning (i.e. weaker students) stimulate deeper thinking and understanding in their more academically adept peers. Which students will benefit the most from this strategy?

Listening to students during the dialogue is the most valuable means for determining whether or not students are learning the strategies and whether or not the strategies are helping them. In whole group settings, students may be asked to write out questions and summaries to be checked by the teacher or other students. How do I assess students using the RT strategy

Continuous monitoring and evaluation of performance should take place to determine the kind of support or scaffolding the students need to successfully execute the strategies. Monitoring, however, may become more infrequent when students become more adept at monitoring their own performance. How long should teachers monitor students RT

Teachers wishing to adopt the Reciprocal Teaching technique into their curriculum should have the digest provided complete with graphic organizers of the questioning, summarizing, clarifying and predicting strategies. Some thought must be made about the text to provide for instructive purposes during the learning phase. How do teachers start and continue RT?

The ability level of the students should be taken into account before choosing a challenging text. A daily journal would be helpful to refer to as students are scaffolding at different rates. Also, at least one other teacher to collaborate with and debrief occasionally would be very helpful. How do teachers start and continue RT?

Sources: Carroll, Ann-Martin. (1988) Reciprocal Teaching. Presentation given at the California Reading Association, San Diego, CA. Palincsar, A. S. & Brown, A. (1984). Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehension Monitoring Activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1(2), Walker, B. (1988). Diagnostic Teaching of Reading. Columbus, Ohio: Merrill Publishing Co. How do teachers start and continue RT?