UNPACKING RECIPROCAL TEACHING

Before introducing the four aspects of reciprocal teaching, choose a well-structured text with enough paragraphs that each student can analyze at least one. Also make sure students determine their purpose in reading the text. What are they looking for? What do they want to remember? Having a purpose primes students to pay attention and increases the likelihood information will be stored in long-term memory. Explain each strategy and then monitor students as they practice them in small groups.

Predict

Explain predictions should be based on evidence from the text. Tell students to use what they have read in the publication to anticipate what they are about to read. Encourage them to look for clues such as titles, heading, pictures, and captions. After students have made predictions, they can compare them to what the text says.

Language to express predictions includes:

  • I predict
  • I think
  • I’ll bet
  • I wonder
  • I imagine
  • I suppose

Clarify

During reading, ask if anyone got stuck on a word, phrase, or an idea. What was hard to understand? What didn’t they don’t know? When readers are confused about what the author is trying to get across, they must stop reading to think about what the author is saying. Many struggling readers think good readers read everything quickly. However, proficient readers actually constantly adjust their reading rate – they speed up and even skim easy, boring, or unimportant parts and slow down to concentrate on difficult or confusing parts. They select the reading rate that meets the needs of the task at hand.

Tell students if a word is unclear, try re-reading first. If that doesn’t work, they should look at word parts or little words inside of a big word. They also can substitute another word to see if the sentence then makes sense. Another option is to use a dictionary or thesaurus to check meaning. To indicate a need for clarity, they can use language such as: “I didn’t get it. . . ”

Question

Prompt students to ask others or even themselves a question that can be answered in the text with a search. This can be before, during, or after the reading. Besides establishing ownership in the reading process, students are self-checking their own text comprehension. When asking others to answer the question, students should show where they found the answers, too. Once students have mastered these familiar search questions, students can begin to formulate higher level questions with question phrases such as:

  • What caused?
  • What are the characteristics of?
  • What if?
  • Would you agree that?
  • What does the author mean when?
  • Would you agree that?
  • Would it be better if?

Summarize

Tell students summarizing is determining what matters and what doesn’t and then explaining what is important in their own words. When summarizing narrative text, students should use story structure (e.g., characters, setting, problem, events, resolution) to help recount the story in order. With expository text, students will determine the most important ideas and arrange them in a logical order.

Prompt students using the language of summarizing. Sentence stems include the following:

  • First…
  • Next…
  • Then…
  • After that…
  • Finally…

Or use:

  • The story takes place…
  • The main characters are…
  • A problem occurs when…
  • I learned that…
  • The most important ideas in this text are…
  • This part was about…

Once the strategies have been explained, model each one by analyzing the first paragraph of the pre-selected text.  Next, divide the class into small groups. Each student in a group will analyze a paragraph using the four skills and “teach” each one to their group with their assigned paragraph. Encourage students to discuss their experiences and opinions about the skills.