Why reciprocal teaching

Listen to feedback and see if there was any confusion that you can address in future lessons. Give students a reciprocal teaching worksheet, like the one below, for them to work on as they complete their assigned readings.

The worksheet will help students stay on track as they work through readings on their own. It will also act as a way for you to track their progress! Read the worksheets thoroughly to see if there are any building blocks that need to be covered more in-depth.

After reviewing the worksheets, you can work together as a class to clarify any problem areas. This is a great way to help students who are struggling with concepts more than others without singling them out or making them feel uncomfortable.

For the most part, the strategies we discussed help students improve their reading comprehension in language-based subjects.

Is it possible to adapt these strategies to other subjects? Mathematical literacy is the ability to analyze, problem-solve, and reason with the use of numbers and mathematical equations. It is the understanding of different mathematical terms such as sum or median, and the ability to decipher what math problems are actually asking.

Students who used reciprocal teaching methods to solve problems were able to better understand questions and solve more problems correctly than students who were not taught with the same method.

The strategies for reciprocal teaching in math are similar to those in language-based classes, however, there are a few differences. Applying the same integration as the language based strategy teacher modeling, group work, individual work, track progress should yield similar results in the comprehension of word-based math problems.

Tracking progress in math classes is even easier with free software like Prodigy Game, which you can use to assign problems, see results, and make decisions based on how your students are learning.

The strategy has been shown to help in subjects like English, math, science, and history. Reciprocal teaching strategies are based on incorporating four fundamental building blocks into the classroom so students have a better idea of how to digest assigned readings.

These building blocks are:. Properly incorporating the strategies we listed above can help your students with the learning process and improve their overall reading abilities! Contents What is reciprocal teaching? Reciprocal teaching strategy Reciprocal teaching lesson plan Reciprocal teaching in math Conclusion. What are the reciprocal teaching strategies? These clarifications may take the form of the following questions:. After you have modeled the previous steps, students may continue working in their small groups by silently or orally reading the next sections of the reading while conducting the four-step process.

Classroom Strategies Reciprocal Teaching. Background Reciprocal Teaching is a strategy that asks students and teachers to share the role of teacher by allowing both to lead the discussion about a given reading. Benefits Reciprocal Teaching is a great way to teach students how to determine important ideas from a reading while discussing vocabulary , developing ideas and questions, and summarizing information.

Create and use the strategy Break the classroom into mixed-ability small groups. Prediction Ask students to predict what they think the reading may be about. Taking Reciprocal Teaching Further. Teachers in Highland Park, Michigan, conducted research and began an effective reading instruction program for students who were not succeeding in school. Reciprocal Teaching raised hopes, expectations, and student achievement in less than one year.

Rigid school structure. Lack of training. Few resources and supportive systems. Deeply entrenched resistance to change. Low teacher morale. Low student achievement. Abysmal test scores.

Low graduation rate. In , these indicators had combined to doom the Highland Park, Michigan, school district to the limbo of possible takeover or sanctions by the state.

Even when honest attempts to develop responsive Chapter 1 intervention programs were launched in Highland Park a small district in Detroit, with almost percent African-American enrollment , nothing seemed to work. The children were not learning, and the teachers were frustrated, unhappy, and exhausted. In that school year, when I assumed responsibility for student achievement as curriculum director first and later as assistant superintendent , I faced the challenge of my professional career: giving the teachers hope and stimulating student achievement.

My first goal was to bring elementary student achievement to at least the minimum standard required by the Chapter 1 program.

Three out of four Highland Park elementary schools faced the sanction of Program Improvement status—the designation given to schools that are unable to reach National Curve Equivalent NCE targets and so are required to revise their Chapter 1 plans under state oversight and approval.

Making the challenge even more daunting were the new core curriculum requirements, accompanied by new teaching strategies, new testing systems, and new school improvement teams that consumed even more teacher time. Thus, endorsement standards are lower than the state standard for satisfactory performance. Accordingly, students can receive "endorsement" even when they fail to attain a satisfactory score on the MEAP. However, their school cannot receive accreditation unless 66 percent of the students have met or exceeded the state standard for reading, math, and science.

And if schools fail to receive accreditation status, they face state sanctions including closure, state takeover, or vouchers for parents to send their children elsewhere. In , fewer than 30 percent of Highland Park's graduating seniors had attained scores high enough to qualify even for endorsed diplomas. The 10th and 11th graders also posted dismal records. By anyone's estimate, achievement was not taking place in Highland Park despite some Herculean efforts to reverse this state of affairs.

That same year, we decided to take advantage of the extra chances that high school seniors were given to be retested for the diplomas—even though retest results were discouraging. Previous test preparation efforts had generated few students whose scores improved as a result of the intervention tried—regardless of the nature of the intervention. The typical average percentage of students who improved on MEAP retests was less than 5 percent.

Yet despite these discouraging figures, the Highland Park curriculum office developed what we called a "quick-fix test preparation intervention" to help high school students—particularly the seniors—score higher on the MEAP. For both goals, we surveyed the research on urban students, cognitive science, and reading comprehension and decided that we would try Reciprocal Teaching. With a clear focus and purpose in mind and mounds of encouraging research findings, we chose Reciprocal Teaching because of its emphasis on reading comprehension—particularly in the short term.

This program involves training students to use four strategies that are associated with both improving reading comprehension and self-monitoring of comprehension while reading Palinscar and Brown ; Palinscar , The four strategies are 1 generating questions, 2 summarizing, 3 clarifying, and 4 predicting. Reciprocal Teaching has been heralded as effective in helping students improve their reading ability in pre-post trials or research studies Pearson and Doyle , Pressley et al.

According to Bruer , Reciprocal Teaching helps novice readers learn and internalize the strategies excellent readers employ. Once the students are comfortable with the process and the strategies, they take turns leading similar discussions in small groups.

The reciprocal teaching technique was developed in the s by two University of Illinois educators Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar and Ann L. Using reciprocal teaching, improvements have been noted in student reading comprehension in as little as three months and maintained for up to one year. The strategies used in reciprocal teaching sometimes called the "Fab Four" are summarizing, questioning, predicting, and clarifying.

The strategies work in tandem to dramatically increase comprehension. Summarizing is a vital, though sometimes challenging, skill for readers of all ages. It requires that students use a summarizing strategy to pick out the main idea and key points of the text. Then, the students must put that information together in order to concisely explain the meaning and content of the passage in their own words.

Start with these summarizing prompts:. Questioning the text helps students develop critical thinking skills. Model this skill by asking questions that encourage students to dig deep and analyze, rather than summarize.

For example, prompt the students to consider why the author made certain stylistic or narrative decisions. Start with these prompts to encourage students to question the text:. Predicting is the skill of making an educated guess. Students can develop this skill by looking for clues in order to figure out what will happen next in the text, or what the story's main message will be.

Help students practice this skill by giving open-ended prompts that include phrases like "I believe" and "because":. Clarifying involves using strategies to understand unfamiliar words or complicated texts as well as self-monitoring to ensure overall reading comprehension.

Comprehension problems may arise due to difficult words in the text, but they can also result from students being unable to identify the main idea or key points of the passage.