Reciprocal teaching is a successful reading strategy that gives learners ownership and responsibility. It requires them to play the role of teacher (hence the title) and complete a reading assignment in charge of their own comprehension.
Here’s how it works. I put students into groups of four, with the understanding that if they perform well during a RT session, they may eventually be able to choose their own group members. When I group the students, I think about how well they will work together, depend on each other, and stay on task.
Once in the groups, each member is given a pre-established role. The roles I typically use include predict, clarify, question and summarize. Those four “roles” are basically the four reading strategies the students are utilizing for the given assignment. All of my students are already aware of the benefits of predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarizing while reading because we’ve used them as reading strategies individually and grown to understand how they work. Each student is completing all four of the strategies while reading (the students document their use of each strategy on their own worksheet), regardless of their role.
The “role” factor comes in because one of the students in the group is assigned to be the predictor, for example. Once every group member has written down their prediction, the “predictor” plays teacher and starts the discussion about predictions. If a student is the “clarifier,” this means that student is responsible for checking with his or her group members about what needs clarification. Anybody can help clear things up. If a student is the “questioner,” this means that student is responsible for starting the discussion on what questions students asked about the text. If a student is the “summarizer,” this means that student is responsible for generating the sharing of summaries and working to form a cohesive group summary.
The end result and benefits of this teaching strategy include the students’ utilization of four strategies while reading, a dependency on each other for checking comprehension while reading, and a shared conversation about the text. Students lean on each other for discussion about the text; questions are generated from the learner and answered by the learner, rather than generated by the teacher and/or answered by the teacher.
Students walk away with the skills they need to be an independent learner in today’s fast-paced society that we won’t be walking hand-in-hand with them in. They lean on their peers for help with a difficult text. They remember to utilize their reading strategies to check for comprehension because they’re doing it themselves and not being asked to do it by the teacher in whole-group instruction.
To introduce this learning strategy to my students, I used a PowerPoint. To document their use of the reading strategies (making predictions, writing down things that need clarification, asking questions and generating a summary), I gave them a word document with a table. They set up stopping points before reading to talk as a group and complete their teacher roles – who needs something clarified? What questions can we ask about the text? What predictions have you made? What does a summary for this portion look like? – for each of the stopping points.
While the RT session is going on, I walk around and pop in on conversations. I help the students remember their job is to start the conversation for their assigned strategy. I hear amazing things from my students during a RT session. They actually say things like, “Can you clarify this part for me? I got confused when…” Their using the tools that each of them brings to the table to work through a text and comprehend it. They take charge of their own learning, rather than sitting back and waiting to hear it from the teacher.
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