What is Reciprocal Teaching?

Reciprocal Teaching is a strategy that asks students and teachers to share the role of teacher by allowing both to lead the discussion about a given reading. Reciprocal teaching includes four strategies that are first introduced to the classroom by the teacher and after those strategies are learned, students are asked to take the role of a teacher and lead a dialogue about what has been read. Those four strategies are:

• Predicting
• Question generating
• Clarifying
• Summarising

Reciprocal teaching, developed by Palincsar and Brown (1984) was thought to help students move from decoding the text to comprehending it. I will talk about the reasons why it has to be used in classrooms later on. First, let's move on to the steps to use this teaching method.

PREPARING STUDENTS TO USE RECIPROCAL TEACHING
(Suggested by Donna Dyer of the North West Regional Education Service Agency in North Carolina)

1. Put students in groups of four.
2. Distribute one note card to each member of the group identifying each person's unique role: Predictor, questioner, clarifier, summarizer.
3. Have students read a few paragraphs of the assigned text selection. Encourage them to use note-taking strategies such as selective underlining or sticky-notes to help them better prepare for their role in the discussion.
4. At the given stopping point, the Summarizer will highlight the key ideas up to this point in the reading.
5. The Questioner will then pose questions about the selection: Unclear parts, puzzling information and connecitons to other concepts already learned.
6. The clarifier will address confusing parts and attempt to answer the questions that were just posed.
7. The predictor  can offer predictions about what the author will tell the group next or, if it's a literary selection, the predictor might suggest what the next events in the story will be.
8. The roles in the group then switch one person to the right, and the next selection is read. Students repeat the process using their new roles. This continues until the entire selection is read.
9. Throughout the process, the teacher's role is to guide and nurture the students' ability to use the four strategies successfully within the small group. The teacher's role is lessened as students develop skill.

This sequence, suggested by Donna Dyer is a good way to get things started. After those steps are modeled, students may continue working in their small groups by silently or orally reading the next sections of the reading while conducting the four-step process.

Now let's take a look at each of the four strategies to see what they bring to the comprehension of the reading material.

• Predicting

Predicting is definitely beyond "guessing". It involves previewing the text to anticipate what may happen next. Readers can use text evidence and information from the text along with their prior knowledge to make logical predictions before and during reading. To prevent students from making simplistic predictions, encouraging students to use the following phrases will be very effective:

• I think … because …
• I'll bet … because …
• I wonder if … because …
• I imagine … because …
• I suppose … because …
• I predict … because …
• I think I will learn … because …
• I think … will happen because …

Predicting is a strategy that helps students set a purpose for reading and monitor their reading comprehension. It makes them more likely to become interested in the reading material. The key here is to scaffold the discussion so that students will make logical and increasingly advanced predictions.

• Questioning

Good readers ask questions throughout the reading process. But coming up with questions is often times a difficult task. To encourage students to get more flexible with this task, the following sequence could be applied:

• Ask, "I wonder" questions before reading and while previewing the cover, title, and text. Base these "wonderings" on the art and by skimming the text.
• Ask "I wonder" questions throughout reading.
• Formulate thinking questions about the setting, characters, problem, events, resolution, and theme.
• Ask thinking questions about whether you agree or disagree with the characters' actions or the author's choices in words and story line.
• Ask text-dependent questions, such as "What examples does the author include?" and "Why did the author use the word ____?"
• Ask thinking questions about whether you agree or disagree with the author's choice of story line, vocabulary, or organization.

• Clarifying

 A broad definition of clarifying includes keeping track of one's comprehension of the text and maintain meaning during reading. Clarifying helps students monitor their comprehension as they identify problems, misunderstandings, and the meaning of new and unfamiliar words. During the clarifying step, students get to identify and admit that they can get stuck on a word or idea and they also get to find ways to cure this difficulty. Students can clarify the meanings that they don't understand, words they don't know and ideas and/or phrases that are unfamiliar.

• Summarizing

Summarizing is a complex process that requires the synthesis of various skills and strategies, including recalling important events and details, sequencing, paraphrasing, and using synonyms or selecting vocabulary. When summarizing a story, students may use the setting, characters, problem, events, and resolution to guide their summaries. To make summarizing easier, trying to stop more frequently throughout a text to allow students to share verbal summaries or dramatize text could be very useful. During reciprocal teaching, the teacher and students should take turns summarizing different parts of a text. Students may use the following phrases to guide their summaries:

• The most important ideas in this text are …
• This part was mostly about …
• This book was about …
• First …
• Next …
• Then …
• Finally …
• The story takes place …
• The main characters are …
• A problem occurs when …
• In the beginning/middle/end …

WHY USE RECIPROCAL TEACHING?

• It encourages students to think about their own thought process during reading.
• It helps students learn to be actively involved and monitor their comprehension as they read.
• The technique is easily understood and mastered by both teachers and students.
• Makes reading interactive. Readers interact with the text as their prior experience is activated. Using prior experience as a channel, readers learn new information, main ideas, and arguments. Most important, readers construct meaning from the text by relying on prior experience. 

Sources:

Chapter 1. The Fab Four: Reciprocal Teaching Strategies. (2018). In Reciprocal Teaching at Work: Powerful Strategies and Lessons for Improving Reading Comprehension (3rd ed.). Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/118045/chapters/The-Fab-Four@-Reciprocal-Teaching-Strategies.aspx

All About Adolescent Literacy. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from http://www.adlit.org/strategies/19765/

Why Reciprocal Teaching? (1997, March). How Children Learn, 54(6), 64–68. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar97/vol54/num06/Why-Reciprocal-Teaching¢.aspx

Gregory, G. (2016). Teacher as activator of learning. Retrieved from https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=8L9nCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT107&lpg=PT107&dq=Palincsar, Ransom, & Derber, 1989&source=bl&ots=8xgJfASKep&sig=ACfU3U36QsnpojQq2rd2AuxVhF6Pz2EWPA&hl=tr&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwie_rfP0IPpAhWsA2MBHbJVAtkQ6AEwAnoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=Palincsar, Ransom, & Derber, 1989&f=false

Palincsar, A. S. & Brown, A. (1984). Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehension Monitoring Activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1(2), pp. 117-175.