reciprocal teaching -...

RECIPROCAL TEACHING Resources to Supplement

Reading for Understanding

SOCIAL

PERSONAL

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING

COGNITIVE

METACOGNITIVE CONVERSATION (Internal & External)

Strategic Literacy Initiative

www.wested.org/stratlit

©WestEd 2002 All rights reserved.

A production of the Strategic Literacy Initiative Jana Bouc Jane Braunger Margot de Vries Pamela Fong Cynthia Greenleaf

Gina Hale Lori Hurwitz Rita Jensen Marean Jordan Cindy Litman

Tamara Taylor Reeder Cathy Rico Ruth Schoenbach

Special thanks to the teachers who contributed their classroom lessons to this resource.

Reciprocal Teaching

Table of Contents

Supplementary Resources Overview....................................................... i

The Reading Apprenticeship™ Framework......................................................... ii

Reciprocal Teaching Introduction ...........................................................1 What Is It? ................................................................................................................1 Why Use It? .............................................................................................................. 3 When to Use It ......................................................................................................... 3 How to Use It............................................................................................................ 4 Using Reciprocal Teaching in a Reading Apprenticeship™ Classroom......... 6

Classroom Applications..............................................................................9

Reciprocal Teaching with a Discussion Leader .................................................. 9 Overhead: Reciprocal Teaching with a Discussion, Small Group Practice ...............11 Handout: Reciprocal Teaching: The Strategies ..........................................................13

Reciprocal Teaching: A Role Sharing Model.................................................... 15

Scaffolding the RT Process ................................................................................. 16 Handouts: Role Sharing Cards.............................................................................. 17-23 Overhead: Reciprocal Teaching: Role Sharing, Small Group Practice......................25

Introducing Reciprocal Teaching in a Fishbowl ..............................................27

Reciprocal Teaching Logs......................................................................................30 Handout: Reciprocal Teaching Logs ..................................................................... 33-35

Additional Scaffolding Ideas ............................................................... 37

Fading Leading to Demonstration ........................................................ 38

Monitoring and Assessing Reciprocal Teaching................................ 39

Additional Resources ............................................................................... 41

Reciprocal Teaching

Reciprocal Teaching

Supplementary Resources Overview Reading Apprenticeship™ is an approach to secondary literacy instruction designed to deepen students’ engagement and thinking about text, and to expand their identities to encompass broader views of themselves as readers and as students. This packet of resources is designed to support teachers in constructing a Reading Apprenticeship™ classroom. It is a supplement to the book, Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms.

Supplementary Resources Are Deliberately Economical

Secondary, content-area reading instruction must center on high-leverage strategies. For this reason, these supplementary resource materials contain a small number of research-based reading strategies that yield a high return in increased reading achievement and engagement. In this packet, you will find:

• an introduction to Reciprocal Teaching;

• guidelines for implementing Reciprocal Teaching successfully; classroom applications designed to help students become more aware of themselves as readers, and to give them more control over their learning;

• a preview of challenges you might expect as you implement Reciprocal Teaching in your classroom, and suggestions for how to handle them;

• a set of RT standards to help you assess student mastery of RT; and

• a list of additional resources.

Supplementary Resources Are Grounded in the Reading Apprenticeship™ Framework and an Inquiry Approach to Professional Development

To effectively apprentice students to the reading craft, teachers must deepen their understanding of the reading process and gain an appreciation for the difficulties students face and the resources they bring to the reading task. For this reason, the resources in this packet are designed to be embedded in a long term program of inquiry-based Reading Apprenticeship™ professional development, in which teachers consider how to embed these instructional strategies into their content-area teaching, make instructional decisions based on their students’ needs, explore these strategies in their classrooms, and share and reflect on these experiences with colleagues. Teachers are invited to explore and adapt the classroom applications in the supplementary resource materials—to exercise professional judgment rather than merely replicate practices.

A Request

These supplementary resource materials were developed to support teachers in translating and extending what they learn in professional development settings into classroom

© WestEd 2001 All rights reserved i Strategic Literacy Initiative March, 2002

Reciprocal Teaching

practice, not as a substitute for such inquiry. We ask for your support in using this set of materials to invite teacher inquiry and support instructional decision-making. We also ask that should you use these resources with teachers, you keep these materials intact, so that practical classroom applications can be seen in the context of the bigger Reading Apprenticeship™ picture.

The Reading Apprenticeship™ Framework

Reading Apprenticeship™ is an approach to reading instruction that helps young people develop the knowledge, strategies, and dispositions they need to become more powerful readers. It is at heart a partnership of expertise, drawing on what teachers know and do as discipline-based readers, and on adolescents’ unique and often underestimated strengths as learners. Reading Apprenticeship™ helps students become better readers by:

• engaging students in more reading—for recreation as well as for content-area learning and self-challenge;

• making the teacher’s discipline-based reading processes and knowledge visible to students;

• making students’ reading processes, motivations, strategies, knowledge, and understandings visible to the teacher and to one another;

• helping students gain insight into their own reading processes; and

• helping them develop a repertoire of problem-solving strategies for overcoming obstacles and deepening comprehension of texts from various academic disciplines.

In other words, in a Reading Apprenticeship™ classroom, the curriculum expands to include how we read and why we read in the ways we do, as well as what we read in content area classes.

Reading Apprenticeship™ involves teachers in orchestrating and integrating four interacting dimensions of classroom life that support reading development. These dimensions are woven into subject-area teaching through metacognitive conversations—conversations about the thinking processes students and teachers engage in as they read.

• Social: The social dimension draws on adolescents’ interests in peer interaction as well as larger social, political, economic, and cultural issues. A safe environment is created for students to share their confusion and difficulties with texts, and to recognize the diverse perspectives and resources brought by each member.

• Personal: This dimension draws on strategic skills used by students in out-of-school settings; their interest in exploring new aspects of their own identities and self-awareness as readers; and their purposes for reading and goals for reading improvement.

• Cognitive: The cognitive dimension involves developing readers’ mental processes, including their repertoire of specific comprehension and problem-solving strategies. Importantly, the work of generating cognitive strategies that support reading comprehension is carried out through classroom inquiry.

© WestEd 2001 All rights reserved ii Strategic Literacy Initiative March, 2002

Reciprocal Teaching

• Knowledge-Building: This dimension includes identifying and expanding the knowledge readers bring to a text and further develop through personal and social interaction with that text, including knowledge about word construction, vocabulary, text structure, genre, language, topics and content embedded in the text.

In Metacognitive Conversation, these four dimensions are integrated as teachers and students work collaboratively to make sense of texts, while simultaneously engaging in a conversation about what constitutes reading and how they are going about it. This metacognitive conversation is carried on both internally, as teacher and students reflect on their own mental processes, and externally, as they share their reading processes, strategies, knowledge resources, motivations, and interactions with and affective responses to texts.

For more information about Reading Apprenticeship™ see Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms, by Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Christine Cziko and Lori Hurwitz; Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco, CA, ©1999. Also, visit the Strategic Literacy Initiative website at http://www.wested.org/stratlit.

Dimensions of Classroom Life Supporting Reading Apprenticeship

Dimensions of Classroom LifeSupporting Reading Apprenticeship

SOCIAL DIMENSIONCreating safetyInvestigating relationships between literacy and powerSharing book talkSharing reading processes, problems, and solutionsNoticing and appropriating others ways of reading

KNOWLEDGE-BUILDING DIMENSIONMobilizing and building knowledge structures (schemata)Developing content or topic knowledgeDeveloping knowledge of word construction and vocabularyDeveloping knowledge and use of text structuresDeveloping discipline- and discourse-specific knowledge

COGNITIVE DIMENSIONGetting the big pictureBreaking it downMonitoring comprehensionUsing problem-solving strategies to assist and restore comprehensionSetting reading purposes and adjusting reading processes

PERSONAL DIMENSIONDeveloping reader identityDeveloping metacognitionDeveloping reader fluency and staminaDeveloping reader confidence and rangeAssessing performance and setting goals

METACOGNITIVE CONVERSATION

(Internal & External)

© WestEd 2001 All rights reserved iii Strategic Literacy Initiative March, 2002

http://www.wested.org/stratlit

Reciprocal Teaching

Notes RECIPROCAL TEACHING1

Introduction

What Is It? Reciprocal Teaching (RT) is an instructional procedure designed by Annemarie Palincsar and Ann Brown to help struggling readers improve their reading comprehension through interactive dialogue. Although RT was originally designed as an intervention for students who were adequate decoders but poor comprehenders, it has been used successfully with a wide variety of students in many different classroom settings. Reciprocal Teaching integrates all four dimensions of Reading Apprenticeship™ classroom life in a single instructional activity, with metacognitive conversation about reading content and reading processes.

RT dialogue happens while students are reading and is firmly grounded in the text. In the instructional sequence of into, through and beyond, RT is the through; its purpose is to demystify challenging text and move students through it. The close reading that RT affords lays the groundwork for the subsequent “deep discussions” and rich disciplinary learning and exploration that is the ultimate goal of content area instruction. While such discussions may occasionally occur during RT, Reciprocal Teaching is primarily about understanding the gist of the text.

RT is designed to promote agency and responsibility by helping students learn to monitor their own reading, learning and thinking, with or without a teacher present. To achieve this goal, students must have repeated opportunities to practice RT with guidance from an expert reader—the teacher. In the beginning, the teacher assumes a central role in the group— modeling, thinking aloud, prompting, explaining and providing feedback and encouragement. Over time, students assume increasing responsibility for orchestrating the group dialogue and for deepening their understanding of the disciplinary content of the text.

In addition to the teacher’s role as discussion leader and group member, the teacher must decide which texts lend themselves to Reciprocal Teaching. Often, students will do RT only with the most challenging sections of a book or chapter and read the rest of the text on their own. A careful analysis of the text will help the teacher determine when to use RT, and prepare the teacher to 1 Adapted from Using Reciprocal Teaching in the Classroom: A Guide for Teachers, by Annemarie Palincsar, Yvonne David, and Ann Brown, Rev. 1992.

© WestEd 2002 All rights reserved 1 Strategic Literacy Initiative March, 2002

Reciprocal Teaching

Notes scaffold the process (e.g., by chunking the text, identifying potential problems and learning opportunities).

Good candidates for RT include:

• the beginning of a chapter or book;

• passages that introduce important concepts or vocabulary;

• transitions;

• confusing or ambiguous sections; and

• pivotal passages.

As its name implies, Reciprocal Teaching is structured to encourage reciprocity and collaboration. Everyone helps and is helped by everyone else in the group.

Because it involves the orchestration of complex social, personal, cognitive and disciplinary knowledge and processes, successful implementation of RT takes time and practice. However, for teachers and students who are willing to make the required commitment, the payoffs are significant.

RT dialogue is structured around the use of four high-leverage cognitive strategies: questioning, summarizing, clarifying, and predicting. Some teachers have modified RT to include the strategies of visualizing and making personal connections to the text.

Summarizing: Students identify the gist of the text—the main idea or ideas—and restate these ideas in their own words.

Questioning: Students ask and answer questions about the text. They can be taught to ask questions about the text at many levels—using the four types of questions in Question-Answer Relationships (QAR), for example—depending upon the teacher’s learning goals.

Clarifying: Students identify parts of the text that are difficult to understand and ask themselves and one another for help. They are taught to pay attention to difficulties such as new vocabulary, unclear wording, and unfamiliar or difficult concepts and to try strategies such as rereading, reading ahead, using context clues, and discussing to clarify meaning.

Predicting: Students hypothesize about what the author might discuss next in the text and read on to confirm or disprove their hypotheses. They are taught to use clues from the text to anticipate what will follow.

The goal of Reciprocal Teaching is flexible and independent use of the four strategies in the service of constructing meaning.


Reciprocal Teaching

Notes However, it takes time and guidance for students to become familiar enough with RT strategies to use them as needed in any reading situation. Initially the teacher models the Reciprocal Teaching process, and coaches students as they practice using the cognitive strategies to make meaning of what they read. Students then practice RT in small groups, developing increasing skill and independence with the strategies and processes. The teacher continues to support and deepen small group dialogue with modeling, coaching and feedback as needed. Some teachers have found that having students work in pairs facilitates the transition from teacher-directed to small group RT (Lubliner, 2001).

Thus, while the ultimate goal of Reciprocal Teaching is learner independence, this does not happen quickly or with only occasional practice. Reciprocal Teaching is therefore best viewed as a classroom routine, rather than an occasional activity.

Why Use It? Reciprocal Teaching provides opportunities in a socially supported environment for students to practice the comprehension strategies good readers use to make meaning of text. RT helps students become mentally active during reading, know when they are understanding a text and when they are confused, and know what to do to resolve their confusion. Over time, students learn to use the high-leverage cognitive strategies in RT flexibly and independently to monitor their own comprehension. In addition to these long-term goals, RT has an immediate pay-off in students’ better comprehension of the specific content-area materials they read during RT sessions.

When to Use It Reciprocal Teaching is a process that helps students develop thorough comprehension of text. Although its purpose is to help students make meaning as they move through text, RT also prepares students for success in follow-up activities such as essays, discussions and projects. Originally designed to help struggling readers develop the reading strategies necessary to comprehend and learn from expository text, RT procedures have since been adapted to support students reading narrative texts as well. For narrative texts, students predict and track developments in setting, character, plot, problem, and resolution.

In deciding whether to use Reciprocal Teaching with a particular text and task, begin by considering your learning goals. RT helps students surface and clarify important information and concepts and is a good choice when the task requires a fundamental understanding of the text. RT does not assist students in learning


Reciprocal Teaching

Notes discrete facts. If the goal of the lesson focuses on memorization or skimming for discrete information—pulling out the atomic weights of chemical elements or memorizing the names and locations of countries of the world—Reciprocal Teaching is not an appropriate instructional approach.

Whether working with expository or narrative text, Reciprocal Teaching works best when the reading material is moderately challenging and conveys an important idea or disciplinary principle that can be understood by students with the help and support of the teacher and other students in an RT dialogue. During the early stages of RT, select materials that are not overly difficult; however, the text should not be so easy that students could easily learn from it on their own. In other words, use RT with materials that will help convince students that investing time and effort in Reciprocal Teaching pays off in increased understanding and engagement.

How to Use It Setting Realistic Expectations. Reciprocal Teaching requires an investment of instructional time but research shows that when practiced over time it yields improved reading comprehension for students. It draws on skills and strategies from both the Social and Cognitive Dimensions of Reading Apprenticeship™. Students need to be prepared—though not expert—in both these dimensions to be successful when they practice all the parts of the RT process. In thinking about preparing students for Reciprocal Teaching, a good rule of thumb is that in any given task, only one aspect of the task should be new or challenging. For example, if group work is new and students will be co-writing a summary, they should already know how to summarize. Alternatively, if they are familiar with group work, they can use the group to help learn a new skill such as summarizing.


Reciprocal Teaching

Notes Scaffolding Reciprocal Teaching

Cognitive Strategies Social Skills Participating

Question Taking turns Clarify Dealing with noise

Summarize Leadership roles Predict Disagreeing agreeably

Visualize Listening Encouraging

Finally, research indicates that the benefits of RT are reduced when group size exceeds five or six students. Groups of four or five provide enough diversity to aid meaning making, while providing sufficient opportunities for every student to participate in the conversation.

Teaching the Cognitive Strategies. Before introducing RT, it is important to teach the four cognitive strategies one at a time, over a series of days or weeks depending on students’ knowledge of and previous experience with each of the strategies. The order in which students learn the strategies is not important, as the goal is to eventually use them flexibly as needed. When introducing any strategy, students need plenty of practice applying it to reading.

For more on detailed classroom applications and ideas on when to begin each new strategy, see Chapter 5 in Reading for Understanding and Cognition: Resources to Supplement Reading for Understanding

Scaffolding the Social Skills. The social skills involved in RT, which are those required for any kind of complex group work, are as important as the cognitive strategies. Many teachers who use group work in their classrooms will have helped students develop norms for receiving others’ opinions, disagreeing agreeably and so on. In addition to practicing these norms, students need to be able to work reciprocally; that is, to share their expertise and teach each other to construct new understandings of the text. A certain amount of noise is not only unavoidable but productive as part of the collaborative process, but students will probably need periodic coaching and reminders to help them monitor the noise level in their groups.

Discussion Leader Wall Charts. Just as you revisit, expand and deepen students’ understanding of strategies on the Good Readers’ Strategies List (see SLI supplementary resource, Metacognition: Making Thinking Visible), you will want to revisit, expand and deepen students’ understanding of Discussion Leader moves and


Reciprocal Teaching

Notes Reciprocal Teaching processes and norms. Create Reciprocal Teaching wall charts and turn them into living documents by modifying, elaborating and refining them as students gain experience and expertise with RT and RT processes.

Revisit the wall charts regularly, especially during the initial stages of RT, asking open-ended questions about the Discussion Leader role and the RT process such as:

How did things go in your group?

Who was doing the work? What work were they doing?

What was it like being a Discussion Leader? What was hard? What went well?

How did group members support one another and the Discussion Leader? What did group members say or do to keep the discussion going when it got bogged down/distracted/stuck?

How might we tweak the process to …?

How might group members better support one another?

How might the teacher better support your group?

Probe for concrete examples of problems and successes and use these as cases to explore, deepen and expand students’ thinking and repertoire of facilitation and discussion strategies (What was the problem? What did you try? What happened? What did you do then? What other ideas do people have? etc.). Add students’ insights and suggestions to the Reciprocal Teaching wall charts.

Continue to revisit and refine the Reciprocal Teaching charts periodically. Once students gain experience with group facilitation, they might even conduct these debriefings themselves.

Using Reciprocal Teaching in a Reading Apprenticeship™ Classroom Once students have learned to use the cognitive strategies and are working well in groups, they are ready to participate in Reciprocal Teaching. A possible sequence for introducing and moving students through Reciprocal Teaching follows. Note that the gradual transition from teacher-led RT to small group RT with ongoing teacher guidance and support is essential in achieving learner independence. 1. Introduce the concept of Reciprocal Teaching. Let students

know what it is and why they are learning to use it. Explain that research shows this procedure can help them improve their comprehension if they practice the cognitive strategies until the


Reciprocal Teaching

Notes strategies become natural and automatic. Introduce the word Reciprocal. Begin a vocabulary list on the board on butcher paper. Use related words to help students develop the concept that reciprocity is shared, collaborative, cooperative, helpful. This is the spirit in which they will be practicing cognitive strategies in small groups to better comprehend what they read. Choose text carefully. When modeling RT initially, the text should be accessible to most students. As students become more comfortable with the RT dialogue, choose texts that are challenging to most students and similar to the core or supplementary materials they are expected to read. Begin with short sections of text that have been chunked ahead of time. Often a paragraph is sufficient. Later, use increasingly longer segments such as several paragraphs under a heading.

2. Model the RT process. Begin by modeling Reciprocal Teaching with a Discussion Leader (see description below), with the teacher acting as Discussion Leader facilitating an RT dialogue with the whole class. Choose a piece of text that is accessible to most students. Model the appropriate use of the strategies, pausing to Think Aloud to make your mental processes visible to students. It is helpful to post a chart with the strategies for future reference. This process of teacher-led RT should be repeated several times.

3. Model the RT process in a fishbowl with student volunteers. Repeat this with as many groups as needed until it is clear that students understand the RT roles and routines of sharing the work, turn-taking and input from every member of the group and are ready to participate in small group practice.

4. Provide authentic guided practice. Give students opportunities to practice RT in small groups with the teacher observing, actively monitoring the process, and providing coaching and feedback to groups (see Monitoring and Assessing Reciprocal Teaching, p. 30). The class may practice the fishbowl to review the individual cognitive strategies as necessary.

5. Scaffold. Some teachers in the Strategic Literacy Network have adapted the RT model to involve role sharing (see Reciprocal Teaching: A Role Sharing Model), so that each student in the small group leads the discussion on one cognitive strategy and the roles rotate throughout the discussion. The Role Sharing Model helps scaffold the RT process by distributing leadership across the group. It has proven to be particularly helpful in


Reciprocal Teaching

Notes introducing RT to English Language Learners. See Additional Scaffolded Support in this packet for more ideas.

The original model of Reciprocal Teaching with a Discussion Leader is described below as well as Reciprocal Teaching: A Role Sharing Model and additional classroom applications:

Reciprocal Teaching with a Discussion Leader

Reciprocal Teaching: A Role Sharing Model

Introducing Reciprocal Teaching in a Fishbowl

Reciprocal Teaching Logs


Reciprocal Teaching

Notes Classroom Applications

RECIPROCAL TEACHING WITH A DISCUSSION LEADER

Adapted from Using Reciprocal Teaching in the Classroom: A Guide for Teachers, by Annemarie Palincsar, Yvonne David, and Ann Brown, rev. 1992.

Materials • Start with a text that is accessible and chunk it into very short

segments. Later the text should be something that is challenging to most students and similar to the kinds of materials students are expected to read in school.

• Reciprocal Teaching with a Discussion Leader Small Group Practice (optional overhead)

• Reciprocal Teaching: The Strategies is a one-page summary of the four strategies that might be used by a Discussion Leader when facilitating the RT discussion (optional handout).

Process For ease of description, the RT process described below suggests an order for the strategies. In reality, the order in which the strategies are discussed does not matter, and may even be recursive. 1. Create heterogeneous groups of 4-5 students.

2. Optional: Pass out the handout or show on an overhead, Reciprocal Teaching: The Strategies. Briefly explain the RT procedure and rationale to students. Review the four cognitive strategies.

3. Students select a Discussion Leader (DL) for the first text passage (passages should be broken down into manageable chunks). Alternatively, the teacher may want to designate the first discussion leader in each group to help the process go smoothly the first time.

4. The DL makes or asks for predictions about the passage based upon the title, accompanying pictures, or other information given.

5. Students read the passage. Reading can be done either silently or aloud. Reading aloud supports those students who have difficulty with word recognition or language processing. Reading silently provides much needed practice in fluency.


Reciprocal Teaching

Notes The teacher may want to give students the choice to move from reading aloud to reading silently, or to decide based upon the difficulty of the text and the make-up of the group.

6. When all group members have finished reading the passage, the DL begins the dialogue by asking for or framing a question about the text. The group should be encouraged to ask questions that build deeper understanding of the text: a question about the most important information in the text, a factual recall question, an interpretive question, an application question, a question that makes connections between this text and other texts, etc. The DL calls on other students in the group to answer that question and to suggest other questions for the group to answer.

7. The DL suggests or elicits from the group any words, segments of text, or ideas that need to be clarified. The group works to resolve any confusion through discussion, rereading, reading ahead, consulting reference materials, asking the teacher, etc.

8. The DL offers or elicits summaries of the passage and asks for suggestions from the group about how the summaries might be improved.

9. The DL makes or asks for predictions about what the author will discuss or what the group will learn in the next passage.

10. A new DL is selected and the same procedure is repeated with the next chunk of text.


Reciprocal Teaching


Overhead

Reciprocal Teaching with a Discussion Leader

Small Group Practice

1. Choose a Discussion Leader (everyone will have a chance).

2. If the text has not been chunked, chunk it into manageable pieces.

3. Read a section of the text silently.

4. When group members are ready (move the process along but don’t rush), the Discussion Leader prompts the group to share out their questions, clarifications, summaries, and predictions.

5. Choose a new Discussion Leader. 6. Repeat the process above.

Reciprocal Teaching


Reciprocal Teaching Handout

Question Ask and answer questions about the text to help you understand and remember what you read. Use the types of questions we have studied. Ask the group to contribute additional questions to create interest or identify passages that need clarifying.

Clarify Identify any parts of the reading that are confusing or difficult, such as new vocabulary, unclear wording, and unfamiliar or difficult concepts. Ask the group to help with these difficulties. Identify the strategies that are being used to clarify (re-reading, reading ahead, using context clues, discussing to clarify meaning).

Summarize In your own words restate the main idea, or ideas, from the piece you read. Depending on the length of the section, use only one sentence. Remember, summaries are formed, not found. Synthesize the ideas of the author. Use the group’s ideas to build an improved summary.

Predict Review predictions from the previous section. Which ones were closest? Ask yourself and the group what you think you will read about next. Use the clues in the text to support your hypotheses. Use predicting to build interest, to check for understanding, and to set a purpose for reading.

Reciprocal Teaching: The Strategies


Reciprocal Teaching


Reciprocal Teaching

RECIPROCAL TEACHING: A ROLE SHARING MODEL

Notes

Purpose The original Reciprocal Teaching model involves one student at a time acting as a discussion leader. Students take turns facilitating the entire RT discussion for a round. This places a great deal of responsibility on the student acting as a Discussion Leader to model the cognitive strategies and to maintain leadership in the group for that round. (See Reciprocal Teaching: A Discussion Leader Model above.) In Reciprocal Teaching: A Role Sharing Model, the discussion leader is replaced by role sharing: students each take turns facilitating a part of the RT discussion. This version serves as an early scaffolding tool during the transition from teacher-facilitated to student-led groups by spreading the leadership responsibility to all members of the group. Before students participate in Role Sharing groups, they should have sufficient experience with the Discussion Leader Model, with the teacher participating as a group member, so they have a vision of where they are headed.

The Role Cards allow students to practice one strategy at a time and to share the responsibility for leading the discussion. They can also act as reminders of how to use each strategy and as discussion prompts for the group. This application as it is described presumes that students have already learned and are comfortable using the four cognitive strategies.

Materials • Reciprocal Teaching Role Cards, copied on four colors of

paper, possibly laminated

• Text to read (see notes on choosing text above)

• Reciprocal Teaching Role Sharing Small Group Practice Directions (optional)

• Reciprocal Teaching: The Strategies, summarizing all four strategies (optional)

Process 1. Pass out text students will be reading and handout: Reciprocal

Teaching: The Strategies. Review the entire Reciprocal Teaching process and its purpose to students. Review the cognitive strategies as necessary.


Reciprocal Teaching 2. Place the Reciprocal Teaching Role Sharing Small Group

Practice Directions on the overhead. Explain the roles to the whole class. Clarify that the role of each person is to facilitate and participate, to help the group construct responses, but not just to complete the task for the group.

Notes

3. Arrange students into heterogeneous groups of 4.

4. Pass out the Reciprocal Teaching Role Cards so that each group has someone taking each of the four roles.

5. Groups of four participate in RT with the teacher circulating, coaching, and monitoring each group’s work.

6. Revisit RT roles and routines regularly, modifying, elaborating and refining the Role Cards as students gain insight and experience in RT (see Reciprocal Teaching Wall Cards, next pages). Over time, the teacher and students should work toward “fading” the use of cards and roles, transitioning to the Discussion Leader model.

Scaffolding the RT Process Some teachers model the RT Role Sharing process first through a fishbowl demonstration (see Introduction to Reciprocal Teaching in a Fishbowl) with the teacher participating in the fishbowl group. Other teachers initially scaffold the RT process by participating in an introductory RT discussion with each small group. This requires that members of other groups do quiet independent work until the teacher can take a turn with their group. When working with small groups, usually the teacher takes the first turn. The role of the teacher at this stage is to carefully model and demonstrate facilitation of the conversation, and to gently help the students in the group learn the RT roles and practice facilitating the dialogue.


Reciprocal Teaching


Summarizer The summarizer helps group members restate the main ideas in the reading. Reminder: Summaries are formed by the reader, not found in the text. They do not include the details. Summarizing helps readers understand and remember what they have read. You might say: • What are the main ideas in this chunk? • Can you use your own words to state the main idea in one

sentence? • Which parts could you leave out and still get the point across? • How can we combine our ideas into one summary?

Summarizer The summarizer helps group members restate the main ideas in the reading. Reminder: Summaries are formed by the reader, not found in the text. They do not include the details. Summarizing helps readers understand and remember what they have read. You might say: • What are the main ideas in this chunk? • Can you use your own words to state the main idea in one

sentence? • Which parts could you leave out and still get the point across? • How can we combine our ideas into one summary?

Reciprocal Teaching


Reciprocal Teaching


Clarifier The clarifier helps group members find parts of the reading that are not clear, and asks the group to help find ways to clear up these difficulties. Reminder: Good readers look for the parts of a text that are confusing to them and use fix-up strategies such as rereading, scanning ahead, thinking back, identifying unknown vocabulary words, chunking words or phrases, and using prior knowledge to help themselves understand a text. You might say: • Which parts of this were confusing or unclear as you read? • Can anyone else help us clarify that part? • What else can we do to understand this? • What strategies did you use to clarify this part of the reading?

Clarifier The clarifier helps group members find parts of the reading that are not clear, and asks the group to help find ways to clear up these difficulties. Reminder: Good readers look for the parts of a text that are confusing to them and use fix-up strategies such as rereading, scanning ahead, thinking back, identifying unknown vocabulary words, chunking words or phrases, and using prior knowledge to help themselves understand a text. You might say: • Which parts of this were confusing or unclear as you read? • Can anyone else help us clarify that part? • What else can we do to understand this? • What strategies did you use to clarify this part of the reading?

Reciprocal Teaching


Reciprocal Teaching


Questioner

The questioner helps group members ask and answer all types of questions about the text. Reminder: Good readers ask questions as they read to help themselves under-stand and remember what they read. Questions also help build interest and set purposes for reading. You might say: • What questions did you have as you read? • Can anyone else help answer that question? • What kind of question was that? What did we do to find

answers? • Are there any other questions you wonder about?

Questioner The questioner helps group members ask and answer all types of questions about the text. Reminder: Good readers ask questions as they read to help themselves under-stand and remember what they read. Questions also help build interest and set purposes for reading. You might say: • What questions did you have as you read? • Can anyone else help answer that question? • What kind of question was that? What did we do to find

answers? • Are there any other questions you wonder about?

Reciprocal Teaching


Reciprocal Teaching


Predicter The predicter helps the group connect sections of the text by 1) reviewing predictions from the previous section, and by 2) identifying clues about what they will read in the next section. Reminder: Good readers predict what will happen next by using information from the reading. Doing this helps readers stay engaged in their reading, and it helps them check their understanding as they read. You might say: • What were some of the hypotheses we posed last time about

what we just read? • Were any of them correct? • How were you able to predict? What information did you use? • What do you think we will read about next?

Predicter The predicter helps the group connect sections of the text by 1) reviewing predictions from the previous section, and by 2) identifying clues about what they will read in the next section. Reminder: Good readers predict what will happen next by using information from the reading. Doing this helps readers stay engaged in their reading, and it helps them check their understanding as they read. You might say: • What were some of the hypotheses we posed last time about

what we just read? • Were any of them correct? • How were you able to predict? What information did you use? • What do you think we will read about next?

Reciprocal Teaching


Reciprocal Teaching

Overhead Reciprocal Teaching

Role Sharing Small Group Practice

1. Choose a Role Card (everyone will have a chance to do each role).

2. If the text has not been chunked, chunk it into manageable pieces.

3. Read a chunk of the text silently. 4. When group members are ready

(move the process along, but don’t rush), each person in the group fac-ilitates one part of the discussion and encourages the group to share out their summaries, questions, clarifications, or predictions.

5. Trade roles. 6. Repeat the process above.


Reciprocal Teaching


Reciprocal Teaching

INTRODUCING RECIPROCAL TEACHING IN A FISHBOWL

Notes

Purpose Many teachers who use group work in their classrooms will have developed norms for receiving others’ opinions, disagreeing agreeably and so on. In addition to these norms, students need to be able to work reciprocally: that is, to share their expertise and teach each other to construct new understandings of the text. These skills can be taught gradually in paired and small group work before introducing RT, and modeled and reinforced in a fishbowl. The fishbowl is a particularly effective way to introduce complex activities like RT. In addition, the fishbowl can be used for continued modeling and mentoring as needed.

Materials • Text to read (see notes on choosing text in How to Use

Reciprocal Teaching above)

• Reciprocal Teaching Role Cards, if using the Role Sharing model

• Handout: Reciprocal Teaching: The Strategies, summarizing all four strategies (optional)

• Fishbowl debriefing discussion prompts (designed by the teacher) on handouts or an overhead, if desired

Process 1. Explain the entire Reciprocal Teaching process and its purpose

to students.

2. Pass out text and Handout: Reciprocal Teaching: The Strategies. Review the cognitive strategies as necessary.

3. Ask all students to read the text and pay attention to their summaries, questions, clarifications and predictions. Explain that they will be participating in small group discussions based on their work.


Reciprocal Teaching

4. As students finish reading, select three students to participate with the teacher in a fishbowl. Set the fishbowl up according to the diagram below. (This requires some juggling of furniture. If you do not regularly do this with students, you may want to practice on another day first.)

Notes

Teacher

Students participating in RT

Students observing the fishbowl

For more on RT in a Fishbowl, see Reading for Understanding pages 96-97.

5. If students will be practicing the Role Sharing Model, pass out the RT Role Cards to everyone in the class and explain the roles to the whole class. If students will be practicing the Discussion Leader model, explain that role. Clarify that the role of each person (in both the Role Sharing model and the Discussion Leader model) is to facilitate and participate, to help the group construct responses, but not necessarily to show people how to do each strategy. The role of everyone else in the group is to help construct responses and to participate reciprocally.

6. The teacher may wish to have the observers on the outside take notes to help them concentrate on observing and to prepare for a debriefing discussion after the fishbowl. If so, prepare prompts ahead of time and introduce them now. For example, some students might observe and take notes on how people take turns, some might attend to what the job of each role is, some might take notes on how group members encourage each other to participate. In addition to the process, students should note concrete examples of how classmates’ engagement and understanding of the content improved and how comprehen-


Reciprocal Teaching

sion changed and deepened as a result of the process—since this is the ultimate measure of RT’s success. Notes

7. Demonstrate RT for the class in the fishbowl. Each member of the group takes a turn practicing their role, using the RT cards as needed for prompts.

8. Initially, the teacher participates in the RT discussion with the students, taking the first turn (It does not matter which role goes in which order. Sometimes a role repeats. For example, a group may revise their summary as questions are raised or things are clarified). This is an important phase; the role of the teacher here is to carefully model and demonstrate facilitation of the conversation, and to gently help the students learn how to facilitate their RT roles.

9. Debrief the discussion with the entire class. Ask all class members to spend a few minutes writing about what they noticed in the fishbowl process. (If students did the optional observations in step 6 above, they can write briefly on that. If not, you may want to give specific prompts such as: What do you think it would be like to participate in RT? What do you think students need to do to be able to make RT work in this classroom?) In debriefing, have students cite specific examples of how the participants’ understanding of the content improved and how ideas changed and deepened as a result of the process, and what helped or hindered this.

10. Repeat this fishbowl process (perhaps on subsequent days with other readings) until the class is clear on the nature of the conversation and the RT roles.

11. Divide the entire class into groups of four.

12. Groups of four practice RT independently with the teacher moving and monitoring.


Reciprocal Teaching

RECIPROCAL TEACHING LOGS Notes

Purpose The Reciprocal Teaching Logs on the following pages were designed to help middle school English Language Learners and resource students prepare for an RT dialogue and to keep an ongoing set of entries organized in a three-ring notebook. Students can prepare the work while they read the passage and modify their entries during the RT discussion to reflect what they have learned from their participation in the group.

This particular version of an RT log modifies RT to include both the four types of questions from Question-Answer Relationships (see the Questioning packet) and the separate skill of visualizing in the form of an illustrated quote. When copied front to back, the log fits into a three ring binder so that alternate pages face each other and students see all five strategy prompts together while they write.


Reciprocal Teaching Students might also simply use two facing pages from the log for shorter readings rather than create an entire log. Some teachers have used less formal journal entries instead of a log. In a mathematics class, an RT journal entry might look like the following example:

Notes

The text says: 1/4 + 3/8 = __

Summarize: I am being asked to find the number of parts of a whole that will result from adding one out of four parts to three out of eight parts.

Clarify: Are fourths related to eighths? How do I add these two sets of parts? If I divide the fourth in half, I get two-eighths.

Visualize:

1 /4 = 2/8 8/8

Question: Will my answer be greater or less than one whole?

Predict (Guess and Check): I think the answer will be less than one whole because both one-fourth and three-eighths are less than one-half.

Check: 1/4 + 3/8 = 2/8 + 3/8 = 5/8

Materials RT Logs, prepared from the masters on the following pages or journals or notebooks for less formal entries.


Reciprocal Teaching

Process Notes 1. Have students read and take notes in the Reciprocal Teaching

Log or journals to prepare for their participation in the RT dialogue. (The journals should not replace a dialogue!)

2. Students can use their logs or journals during the dialogue. To avoid a dialogue that takes the shape of “This is what I wrote, what did you write?” encourage students to work collaboratively to create a common summary, to create a list of the best questions for a quiz, etc.

3. Students can also add notes from their discussions to their logs or journals.

4. In order to keep students accountable for their journals, you may want to occasionally collect and grade them.


Reciprocal Teaching

Handout

RECIPROCAL TEACHING LOG

Name: Title

Chapter: Pages: Date:

Summary:

Clarify: I was confused by... but then I figured out that...

Visualization (Illustrated Quote):

(Page: )


Reciprocal Teaching


Reciprocal Teaching

Chapter: Pages: Date:

Questions and answers:

Right There (page: )

Pulling it Together (page: )

Text and Me (page: )

On My Own (page: )

Prediction:

1. Re-read your prediction from the last entry. Was your prediction correct? If so, how were you able to determine this? If not, are there any clues that you missed? Why did you make the prediction that you made?

2. What do you think will come next in the text?


Reciprocal Teaching


Reciprocal Teaching

Additional Scaffolding Ideas Notes

Written Preparation Many teachers have found that participation in RT increases when students have opportunities to jot notes as they read to use in their group discussion. Written work is used as preparation for the discussion but does not replace discussion.

Written preparation for RT has both advantages and disadvantages, and these should be carefully weighed and monitored. While written preparation may be especially helpful in scaffolding the participation of ELD students in RT dialogue, it carries the risk of reducing RT to a worksheet mentality and underplaying the goal of collaborative meaning-making. Thus written preparation should be viewed as a scaffold, with the goal of reducing students’ dependence on written preparation. You will want to observe groups carefully to make sure that written preparation supports, rather than undermines, discussion. If you hear students saying things like “My questions are…What are your questions?,” you will need to revisit and model RT goals and processes with the class.

Informal journal preparation. Students write predictions, questions clarifications, and a summary as they read and use it as a resource during the RT dialogue. (See the math journal example in the Reciprocal Teaching Logs classroom application above.)


Reciprocal Teaching

Fading Leading to Demonstration Notes

Dialogue Prompts. If students are using the Role Cards to begin with, introduce other, less rigid supports such as the Reciprocal Teaching: The Strategies handout as students begin to demonstrate that they are able to facilitate the discussion without speaking prompts. Later, students can hold their RT discussions without any prompts or reminders at all.

Written Preparation. Written work can be faded. For example, if students begin using the more formally structured RT Logs, consider using informal journal entries after a time. Teachers may want to consider not doing any written preparation for the RT discussion at all, and provide some kind of follow up assignment for the purposes of assessment. In fact, since collaborative meaning-making is a key goal of RT, success should measured by how well each student in the group comprehends the material following the RT dialogue, and how the group process supported that comprehension.

See Questioning: Resources to Supplement Reading for Understanding.


Reciprocal Teaching

Monitoring and Assessing Notes Reciprocal Teaching

In order to create a productive environment for practicing the RT strategies, there should be frequent assessment. Assessment should focus both on how well students are understanding the material and on how they are helping one another understand the material.

While it is important to hold students responsible for one another’s learning, avoid explicitly or implicitly competitive forms of assessment, such as giving points for participation or having students grade one another, which tend to undermine intrinsic motivation and cooperation among group members. Instead, focus on what it really means to help one another, and provide specific feedback about ways students are helping and hindering one another’s learning.

Assessing Individual Work and Comprehension After each RT session, a short comprehension quiz can be given. Students might receive a grade on the quiz that is the average of two scores: their independent score on the quiz and the average score for the other group members. In this way, students are held accountable for using the RT procedure to make sure everyone understands the text. Be sure students are not penalized for another group member’s refusal to participate for reasons beyond the purview of the group. Remember, as the teacher, you are ultimately responsible for the learning that happens—or doesn’t happen—in RT.

Assessing Group Work and Participation Assign individual follow-up work to assess comprehension such as a technical diagram, a description of a problem solving method, a map, timeline, an abstract, a character journal, an annotated illustration, an essay, a quiz or other individual project. You may want to present the assignment after RT to reduce the risk of group members focusing RT dialogue narrowly on the assignment, rather than on deepening their understanding of the ideas in the text.

Explain that part of the process is to encourage others to participate by asking open-ended and encouraging questions. Sit with groups during discussion to assess ways students are creating a socially supportive environment—and where they need additional support.

Assign a brief group project following the completion of a reading such as a presentation, a debate, a dramatic skit, a book talk, a


Reciprocal Teaching book poster, an illustrated map or timeline, a demonstration or experiment, developing a new problem of the week, etc. Notes Assign certain portions of the RT conversation to be collaborative; for example, have groups create a common summary one day, or collect their five most interesting discussion questions, or write a group quiz based on their questions.

Discuss with the group how things went and what would help students have better discussions. Use these conversations as a chance to offer encouragement and engage students in problem-solving around ways the group can work together better. Help students understand that different people have different resources to offer to the group and that the job of the group is to mine those resources so that everyone in the group can come to a better understanding of the text. Have students reflect on what each group member contributed, and on how the product of their collective thinking was better than what any one person could have come up with alone.

Reciprocal Teaching Diagnostic Indicators Use the Reciprocal Teaching Standards Rubric (adapted from Marilyn Chambliss) to assess strengths and weaknesses and measure student progress in mastering RT.


Reciprocal Teaching

Notes Additional Resources

Lubliner, Shira. A Practical Guide for Reciprocal Teaching. Bothell, WA: Wright Group/McGraw-Hill, 2001.

Palincsar, Annemarie, Yvonne David, and Ann Brown. Using Reciprocal Teaching in the Classroom: A Guide for Teachers, rev. 1992.

Schoenbach, Ruth, Cynthia Greenleaf, Christine Cziko and Lori Hurwitz. Reading for Understanding: Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999.

Questioning pp. 80 - 86

Summarizing pp. 87 - 89

Predicting pp. 89 - 93

Clarifying pp. 93 - 94

Reciprocal Teaching pp. 96 -97

Social and Personal Dimensions pp. 24 - 30

Strategic Literacy Initiative. Cognition - Resources to Supplement Reading for Understanding. WestEd, 2001.

Strategic Literacy Initiative. Questioning Resources to Supplement Reading for Understanding. WestEd, 2001.


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