Reciprocal Teaching
Reciprocal Teaching
Reciprocal Teaching is a teaching method aimed to boost reading comprehension with the help of the joint collaboration of teachers and students. It consists of four main techniques: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing, which facilitate the active involvement of students in reading and the development of their critical thinking skills.
What are the key strategies involved in Reciprocal Teaching?
Reciprocal Teaching focuses on four main strategies which include predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. To illustrate this, in a reading session, the teacher can ask the students to first predict what will happen next in the text, then prompt the students to formulate questions about the content, clarify any confusing parts, and finally, the students have to summarize what they have read to consolidate their understanding.
How does Reciprocal Teaching benefit students' reading comprehension?
Reciprocal teaching is a teaching technique that gives students the chance to learn and teach each other. It mainly promotes their activities such as reading a text, thinking critically about it, and integrating it with the knowledge of their peers. Let us take a look at an example scenario: If students explain a certain concept to each other, they are not only reinforcing this knowledge but also gaining assertiveness in their logical reasoning.
Can Reciprocal Teaching be used for subjects other than reading?
Absolutely! Even though Reciprocal Teaching is mainly for reading comprehension, the basic concept of it can be adapted to other subjects such as science and social studies. For instance, in a science lesson, kids can do a prediction of results of an experiment, make questions about certain scientific concepts, explain the meanings of the terms, and finally, come up with a summary of what they have learned thus becoming familiar with the whole topic.
What is the role of the teacher in Reciprocal Teaching?
The teacher plays the role of a facilitator in Reciprocal Teaching who first models the four strategies and then guides students in their effective use. At first, the teacher shows how to implement these strategies together during the reading sessions before gradually giving the control to the students as they become more confident. The scaffolded approach is the guarantee that students do not just understand the strategies but rather, are able to implement them on their own over the course of time.