What is Reciprocal Teaching?Reciprocal teaching is a strategy where students become the teacher in a small group setting. It refers to an instructional activity that happens in dialogue between teachers and students regarding segments of text (Palincsar, 1986). Once teachers model how to do reciprocal teaching, they then help guide the students through the discussions. For this strategy to be successful the students must learn and become comfortable using the four strategies with reciprocal teaching. Those strategies are summarizing, question generating, clarifying, and predicting (Gunther, 2015). The steps listed to the right can also be used as jobs for the individual students in the groups.
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Steps to Reciprocal Teaching:Summarizing: Provides opportunity to identify and integrate key details and main ideas in a text. A sentence, paragraph, and/or whole pages can be identified (Palincsar, 1986).
Question Generating: Reinforces the summarizing strategy and brings the learner closer to comprehending the text (Palincsar, 1986). Clarifying: Extremely important for students who have had difficulties with comprehension in the past. When students are asked to clarify, their attention is called to the fact that there may be many reasons why the text is difficult to understand (Palincsar, 1986). Predicting: Students hypothesize what the author will discuss next in the story using facts (Palincsar, 1986). |
This link brings you to a video that provides more information and examples of reciprocal teaching. Ms. Lubliner shows the students how to guide a conversation about a book first. Then she uses reciprocal teaching to guide students to learn how to lead a class discussion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=60&v=My68SDGeTHI
Writing Standard
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.6.8
Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources; assess the credibility of each source; and quote or paraphrase the data and conclusions of others while avoiding plagiarism and providing basic bibliographic information for sources.
Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources; assess the credibility of each source; and quote or paraphrase the data and conclusions of others while avoiding plagiarism and providing basic bibliographic information for sources.
How is Reciprocal Teaching Beneficial in a Classroom?
- Using the reciprocal teaching strategy encourages students to think about their own thought process during the reading (Gunther, 2015).
- It helps students learn to be actively involved and monitor their comprehension as they read (Gunther, 2015).
- Teaches students how to determine important ideas from a reading while discussing vocabulary, developing ideas and questions, and summarizing information (Gunther & Lindstrom, 2015).
- It teaches students to ask and answer questions during reading and helps make the text more comprehensible (Gunther, 2015).
- Can be used in several content areas (Gunther & Lindstrom, 2015).
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Stephanie explains to the class how reciprocal teaching works. The main speaker also defines the strategy and discusses when it should be used and why. He also states that the end goal is for the students to independently and naturally follow the steps to deepens their understanding of any text in a given format. Between the students and teacher there is a great amount of examples provided in this video.
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