Reading Strategy: Reciprocal Teaching

Our journey towards building a community of better readers is a long one. Like all journeys, it happens in small measured steps. Learning to read is perhaps one of the hardest things a student will ever learn to do. Intervention Central is an excellent resource to help you find different teaching and intervention lessons/activities. One of my favorite strategies is reciprocal teaching. This technique involves lots of think aloud between the teacher and the students. The basic idea of the strategy is that we learn by watching, then roleplaying, seeing effective modeling, and then actually doing it. Reciprocal teaching is based on the what good readers do when they read text.

It can be done in whole group and perhaps even more effectively in small group once the students have had experience with the technique. Basically the process involves the teacher modeling the self-talk they have while reading a section of text related to summarizing, question generating, clarifying and predicting. As students become familiar with the structure of the activity there is a release of responsibility and the reciprocal part happens when the student plays the role of the teacher and has their own talk aloud with the teacher. In time the students can work together in small groups and take turns being the teacher and talking to their peers about the text as they read together. The talk would always include a running dialogue about what is happening in the text, asking questions about what isn’t understood or why certain events happen in the story, make their understanding more clear as they read (confirming predictions), and make future predictions. The technique works equally well with nonfiction and fiction text although the conversation for each type of text will be quite different.

Give it a try….

Reciprocal Teaching: A Reading Comprehension Package
http://www.interventioncentral.org/htmdocs/interventions/rdngcompr/reciptchng.php

Be A Careful Reader: 4 Strategies to Better Understand What You are Reading
http://www.interventioncentral.org/htmdocs/interventions/rdngcompr/reciptchng1.php

Reciprocal Teaching Strategies Worksheet
http://www.interventioncentral.org/htmdocs/interventions/rdngcompr/reciptchng2.php

Reciprocal Teaching Prompt Cards to Print
http://www.adrianbruce.com/reading/room4/recip/index.htm

Reciprocal Teaching: Building Reading Comprehension
http://wilearns.state.wi.us/apps/Default.asp?cid=129