Reciprocal Teaching (RT) ~ Procedures

Reciprocal teaching is an instructional procedure designed to enhance students' comprehension of text. It is characterized by:

• a dialogue between students in which each takes a turn in the role of dialogue leader
• "reciprocal" interactions where one person acts in response to the other
• structured dialogue using four strategies: predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarizing.

Each of these strategies helps students to construct meaning from text and monitor their reading to ensure that they are in fact understanding what they read. It is extremely important to explicitly teach each of these strategies before expecting students to be able to implement them in reciprocal teaching groups. A good way to do this is to use your shared reading lessons as a time to teach and review the skills needed and specific behaviors expected when students work in their reciprocal teaching groups.

• Predicting. This strategy requires the reader to hypothesize about what the author might discuss next in the text. This provides a purpose for reading: to confirm or disapprove their hypotheses. An opportunity has been created for the students to link the new knowledge they will encounter in the text with the knowledge they already possess. It also facilitates the use of text structure as students learn that headings, subheadings, and questions imbedded in the text are useful means of anticipating what might occur next.
• Clarifying. When teaching students to clarify, their attention is called to the many reasons why text is difficult to understand; for example new vocabulary, unclear referent words, and unfamiliar or difficult concepts. Recognizing these blocks to understanding signals the reader to reread, read ahead, or ask for help.
• Quiz Questioning. When students generate questions, they first identify the kind of information that is significant enough that it could provide the substance for a question. Then they pose this information in a question form and self--test to ascertain that they can indeed answer their own question.
• Summarizing. This strategy provides the opportunity to identify, paraphrase, and integrate important information in the text.
  

Reciprocal Teaching Student Steps:

Once your students have learned the four basic comprehension skills used in reciprocal teaching, they are ready to try them out with the support of their peers in small groups. It is extremely helpful for students to have a "book-mark" or some kind of card with the instructions for the current Discussion Leader (DL) to follow.

1. Decide together what the next section of reading will be.
• DL: How much do you think you should read before you stop to think?
2. Student make predictions about what the text is going to be about.
• DL: Does anybody have a prediction? What do you think it is going to be about? What makes you think this?
3. Read the section of text. Either the discussion leader chooses to read by him or herself or asks the entire group to read togethe.
4. Students clarify words or ideas that they don't understand.
• DL: Who would like to share a word they don't understand? Does anybody know what it means? What strategies can we use to figure it out?
• DL: Now that we understand the words better, are there any ideas you don't understand? Can we make connections to other information or experiences we have about this topic to help us understand?
5. Students take turns developing quiz questions to ask each other.
• DL: Who would like to ask a quiz question?
6. The Discussion Leader is responsible for leading the group in coming up with a short summary of the section read.
• DL: What do you think are the most important parts of what we have read? Can you justify your answer? Why is it important?
• DL: I think we have said that this section is mostly about ...
7. Change Discussion Leaders