Reciprocal Teaching

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Reciprocal Teaching

• A Powerful Reading Strategy

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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.

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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

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Why is it important for students to design their
own questions?

• 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.

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How will Reciprocal Teaching benefit students?

• 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.

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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.

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Which students will benefit the most from this
strategy?

• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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How do I assess students using the RT 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.

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How long should teachers monitor students RT

• 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.

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How do teachers start and continue 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.

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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.

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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), 117-175.
• Walker, B. (1988). Diagnostic Teaching of
  Reading. Columbus, Ohio Merrill Publishing Co.