Reciprocal Teaching

I recently have been thinking about reciprocal reading and how to incorporate it into my primary classroom. I am thrilled with the progress my students have been making working collaboratively. I had to explicitly teach/show them what that looks like and it has taken some time for it to start looking like a collaborative group. I still have some ways to go with a few of my students, but I am hopeful that we will make some great improvements this year.

So, this leads me to Reciprocal Reading. Reciprocal Reading has been around since the 80's and is an instructional activity that uses four comprehension strategies (predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing). Reciprocal Reading also allows the students to take on the role of teacher.   Students are actively involved in monitoring their own comprehension and thinking about their own thought process.

This past week I started by teaching each individual strategy and doing more think alouds than I have ever done in my life. My goal is for them to have a firm grasp of each strategy - at the same time I realize that much of the true learning will be done by trial and error. I guess this is where I have to let go and know there will be some bumps.

Through my researching and thinking about Reciprocal Reading I put together a guide that I hope will keep me focused and may help anyone wanting to try Reciprocal Reading with their primary class. The information I gathered has been taken from a variety of teacher resources I have collected over the years and online freebies.

If you decide to use, let me know what you think. Click on pic to download.