Transcript Excellence in Teaching

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