Reciprocal Teaching

Reciprocal Teaching is a great strategy to use with students in teams.

It looks at four areas of comprehension:
1. Summarizing: Students recognize key information and concisely communicate it.
2. Question generating: Students generate questions at various levels and consider what they know and don’t know about the topic.
3. Clarifying: Students focus on comprehending the material and to use strategies that encourage understanding.
4. Predicting: Students make reasonable suppositions or estimations.
5. Acting: Students and adults in classroom take turns acting as teacher.
 

Instructions:
1. In order to appropriate train students to use this technique it must be modeled by the teacher with the class.
2. As students begin to work in teams one team member is assigned to be “the teacher” of the group. The other group members are assigned as the summarizer, questioner, clarifier, and predictor. If there are only four members of the team the “teacher” can also be the summarizer.
3. Students are given sticky notes or note paper to write on as they read the assigned passage. They focus on the area they were assigned.
4. The summarizer shares the summary they wrote with their team members..
5. The questioner reads the questions they had including unclear or puzzling parts of the passage. They may also write questions that link to previously learned material or words that are unclear to them or they need the meaning of.
6. The Clarifier will attempt to answer confusing questions asked by team members.
7. The Predictor makes predictions of what they will read next based on the information read.
8. The teams switch roles as they continue reading the passage.
For some classes it may take lots of modeling by the teacher before they are ready to work in teams. This can be done as a whole class also.