Show & Tell: A Video Column / Reciprocal Teaching's Untapped Value

• A summarizer, who helps the group identify key points of the passage.
• A clarifier, who invites questions about confusing vocabulary or concepts.
• A questioner, who poses questions to confirm understanding.
• A predictor, who encourages speculation about information the next passage might reveal.

Simple—and Simply Effective

Why should reciprocal teaching be a foundational protocol in elementary and secondary classrooms? For one, its effect size on reading achievement across 38 studies is strong, at 0.75 according to John Hattie's research.²  For another, RT is highly flexible and widely applicable. It's effective across a wide range of reading abilities, including for students with learning disabilities, adolescents with moderate intellectual disabilities, students identified as gifted, and those reading above grade level. RT has been used successfully with students as young as 6, in online environments, and with adults learning classical literature, to name just a few applications.

And have we mentioned that RT is a no-cost instructional strategy? There's no expensive curriculum involved, no prolonged professional development for teachers, and no required special equipment. As the teacher, you choose the text, make decisions about where it should be segmented (usually every few paragraphs or every few pages), and create a template to collect students' notes.

So why don't more classrooms use reciprocal teaching as a foundational reading routine? Perhaps the resistance is due to concerns about the time and attention required to prepare students for RT. The power of reciprocal teaching lies in students' co-construction of knowledge as they work collaboratively to make sense of a challenging piece of text. But this requires that students learn how to do so, first relying on protocols, and then developing the capacity to listen to one another.

Preparing Kids for RT

It takes approximately 20 lessons for RT to fully transition into a student-led dialogic process. During the introductory phase, the teacher takes the lead, primarily by systematically modeling each element of the process. There isn't any one right place to begin—pick the comprehension strategy (summarizing, clarifying, questioning, or predicting) that makes sense for your students. You might begin with a lesson focused on summarizing, for instance, by first modeling and thinking aloud about how you'd summarize a text, and then inviting students to summarize short passages with you. Have students practice the same summarizing strategy a few times in small groups, using a variety of texts.

This process is repeated with a second comprehension strategy—let's say, questioning. Once again, the teacher models the strategy—showing how to pose questions to check readers' understanding—thinks aloud about how to use this strategy, and lets students try it out themselves. After students have practiced the questioning technique individually a few times, they're ready to integrate previous learning with new knowledge. Student groups should do a few rounds in which they both summarize and pose questions connected to a text—so that students don't erroneously believe that comprehension requires only a single approach. The third and fourth strategies can be similarly introduced, practiced, and woven together.

In the video accompanying this column, Melissa Noble, a teacher at Health Sciences High and Middle College in San Diego, has her students use a reciprocal teaching protocol with an article about an ocean cleanup project. Her 5th graders have been learning RT for weeks and are beginning to take on more responsibility as they implement it in small groups. Noble provides guidance and collects formative assessment information about her students' growing capacity to read and discuss text collaboratively (as she monitors their content learning). Her lesson is a good demonstration of how RT can boost students' engagement with a text.

Offering Supports

Many teachers provide their students with language frames to scaffold discussion of the text during reciprocal teaching. For instance, a good sentence frame for summarizing is "The most important thing I read was …," and one for clarifying might be "It didn't make sense until I …". (See suggested supports and prompts in Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Supports and Language Frames for Comprehension Strategies in Reciprocal Teaching

Language frames guide the discussion so that the students fully examine the information they've read together across these dimensions. They also equip student writers with the academic language and organizational structures to write about what they have read. In fact, one underappreciated outcome of RT is the positive effect it has on writing.

Get Started!

It's time to revisit reciprocal teaching and make it a foundational reading routine in classrooms. When whole grade levels or departments commit to teaching students RT, learning time is shortened because students practice these literacy skills across classes and content. So where will you begin?