Reciprocal Teaching (based on research by Palinscar and Brown in 1985) is an interactive reading strategy designed to encourage thoughtful, strategic reading by integrating the processes of predicting, clarifying, questioning, and summarizing. Reciprocal Teaching starts as an oral dialogue between teachers, students and text and moves to an automatic conversation between the reader and the text.
Teaching Model: (scaffolded instruction) I do. We do. You do. Reciprocal Teaching strategies should be introduced to students one at a time and modeled by the teacher through think alouds in a whole class situation. Then, after the students have practiced the strategies (at least 20 times), they should be able to automatically incorporate the strategies as they read.
PREDICTING
Research indicates that predicting helps activate prior knowledge, set a purpose for reading, and connect new information to current information (King & Parent-Johnson 1999). Students may be familiar with making predictions before they begin to read a story. They have learned to make predictions based on titles and picture walks and at key points in a story. They can also learn to make predictions as they read expository text as well. Students can use text structure (heading, sub-headings, and author’s questions) to make predictions as they read science and social studies. They can also learn to predict the vocabulary they might find in a selection.
Prediction stems: (Sticky notes can be used during reading to jot down predictions.)
I think ……………………
I’ll bet …………………..
I wonder if …………………..
I imagine …………………….
I suppose …………………….
I predict ………………… will happen next because ……………………..
Students need to learn that good readers make and check predictions throughout the entire reading of the text (before, during and after reading) and often have to adjust their predictions as they go along. G
Graphic organizer (three-column notetaking)Prediction | Support for prediction | Confirmation/adjustment |
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Questioning
Questioning involves students in thinking about what they don’t know, need to know or would like to know about a passage. Generating questions helps to promote purposeful reading. Questions may lead to further questions and discussion among a group. Questioning should take place before, during, and after reading.
Teacher modeling probes:
One question I had about what I read was ___
What were you thinking about when you read ____
What questions can you ask about what you read?
I’m curious about _________________
Good teacher-like questions are based on information given in the text. Asking teacher-like questions helps a student check to see if they really understand what they have read and helps them identify what is important to remember about the story or the passage. Students must be able to find the answers to the questions in the text. Good questioners ask who, what, when, where, why, how, and what if. They also ask us to compare two or more things, tell why something is important or give the order in which things happened. .
Teacher-like questions
- Where is __________?
- Why is _________________ significant?
- Why does _________________ happen?
- What are the parts of _______________?
- How is _____ an example of ____?
- How do ____ and _____ compare?
- How are ____ and ____ different?
- How does _______________ happen?
- Which sentence best tells ___________________?
- Why does the author _______________________?
- What caused ______________ to _______________?
Clarifying
A third strategy that is an integral part of Reciprocal Teaching is clarifying. Clarifying give students the tools to derive meaning from unfamiliar vocabulary words encountered in a text. Acquiring vocabulary through independent reading is imperative for students since we cannot teach the 3000 new words a year that research says students need to acquire. In order to learn new vocabulary words from context, students must learn what to do when they come across an unfamiliar word or phrase while reading. They need to learn that good readers often stop to get a clearer picture in their minds about the words or ideas that the writer is trying to communicate. The purpose of clarifying is to teach students how to focus on the meaning of vocabulary thus helping them become self-regulating independent readers.
Clarifying skillsConsider the context by looking at the broad text rather than just the individual sentence in attempting to figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word.
Substitute a synonym, a word that may have a similar meaning to the unknown word, and check to determine whether the passage makes sense.
Study the structures to determine if known root, suffix or prefix can help them determine the meaning
Ask an expert -- another member of the group -- for help in figuring out an unfamiliar work
Mine your memory by asking “Where have I seen this word before?”
Place a self-stick note as a reminder of an unknown word so that the student can return to the page to look up the word in the dictionary since stopping while reading to look up words may distract the student from attending to the meaning of the text.
MODELWhile reading aloud, find a word in the text that is confusing. Demonstrate for the students how to re-read the sentence that contains the unknown word as well as the surrounding sentences. Guide the student to an understanding of the definition of the words by helping them see the context clues. If there are no context clues or the clues are obscure, try modeling the use word structures to determine the words meaning.
How to Clarify: Look for little word inside big wordsLook for root words, prefixes or suffixes.Look for a comma which follows an unfamiliar wordKeep reading to get an overall sense of the meaning Clarifying stems:I can’t really understand…A question I have is ….One word/phrase I do not understand is… |
Summarizing
If understanding what we read, comprehension, is the ultimate goal of reading instruction, then the skill of summarizing is of utmost importance for our students. Summarizing provides the opportunity to identify and integrate the most important information in the text.
In narratives, the students can retell the story including setting, characters, events in sequence, explanation of connections between events, descriptive words from the text, and ending. In expository text, the students can give an overview including the author’s purpose and the main theme of a text.
Procedures:
· Text can be summarized across sentences, across paragraphs, and across the passage as a whole.
· At given stopping points, the Summarizer can highlight the key ideas in a reading and restate what they have learned in their own words.
Introduction to summarizing:
· Have student give the title of their favorite television show and one sentence that tells what it is about.
· Use a list of related words (ie: German shepherd, poodle, collie) (cars, buses, trains, ships, planes) and have the students find one word to describe the list.
Summarizing prompt:
· In my own words, this is about…
· The main point was …
· The wanted me to remember…
or
· What does the author want me to remember or learn from this passage?
· What is the most important information in this passage?
· What kind of “teacher” questions can I ask about the main idea?
Strategies:
· In 10 words or less, summarize what you just read (often called “Summary on a Dime” or “GIST)
· One Sentence Summary formula ____________________________________began with ________________________________________________________continued with(a discussion of, a presentation of, a development of the idea that) _______________________________________________, and (or then) ended with (or when) ________________________________________.
How do I assess students using the Reciprocal Teaching strategy in their reading?
Place your students in groups of four. Assign different reciprocal reading roles to each student. Listening to the students’ dialogue during their group discussions to determine whether or not the students are learning to apply the strategies and whether or not the strategies are helping them.