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If you’re a teacher, you must have heard of reciprocal teaching. Being familiar with reciprocal teaching meaning will help you better the technique. You may recollect your student days when a teacher was reading from a book, and instead of focusing on the lesson being read, you were thinking about your weekend trip. What about when you had to read aloud in the class? You may have read the entire page without registering a word. Such a loss of focus results in lack of understanding of a topic in part or full, which is a very common learning obstacle that a student faces. The instructional design of reciprocal teaching helps overcome these challenges.
This blog will help you decode the meaning of reciprocal teaching and the meaning of reciprocal learning through some examples of reciprocal teaching.
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Reciprocal Teaching Definition
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Reciprocal Learning Meaning
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Reciprocal Teaching Strategy
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Reciprocal Teaching Examples
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Embrace Reciprocal Teaching With Harappa
Reciprocal Teaching Definition
The reciprocal teaching definition states that it’s an instructional technique designed to improve students’ reading comprehension skills by empowering them to gradually assume the role of a teacher. It’s a guided discussion technique that involves four main strategies—predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarizing—that good readers use to comprehend new knowledge. The technique reinforces comprehension strategies that help students become independent readers, thinkers and learners and develop a quicker understanding of the given topic. Once students become adept at this technique, a teacher’s role shifts more toward being a facilitator and guide.
You may resonate with it if you keenly observe your process of reading an article or a blog. You may first look through any photos or headlines and try to predict what the content is about. As you read further, you start clarifying words and ideas and begin questioning. You also start predicting as you gain clarity. You keep alternating between predicting, clarifying and questioning until you get clarity of the topic. In the end, you gain a better understanding and can summarize the topic during a discussion.
Reciprocal Learning Meaning
After understanding the meaning of reciprocal teaching, let’s move on to reciprocal learning. It’s a cooperative structure that requires students to work in pairs and help each other understand a topic better. In a classroom setting, students are paired up. Student A has to solve their problem with the help of Student B, who has the solution to the problem. The same process is repeated for Student B.
Reciprocal Teaching Strategy
The reciprocal teaching strategy adopted in a classroom is done by making small groups of four students. Each student is assigned the responsibility of predicting, questioning, clarifying and summarizing while reading a topic.
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Predicting
A student learns to predict the given topic by coming up with ideas of what may happen further in the topic. It’s a process of making an educated guess. It involves what they already know about the topic, finding clues and using their imagination to predict what’s coming next, connecting them with the author’s line of thinking. The student can use the following open-ended statements:
- I predict the topic would further contain…
- I believe the author is trying to depict…
- I think the topic is about…
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Questioning Or Reciprocal Questioning
Questioning helps students develop their critical thinking ability. It allows them to think logically and analytically and peel off the multiple layers of understanding, inculcating the quality of reciprocal questioning. A student learns to ask questions throughout the reading of the topic. The nature of these reciprocal questions could be:
- Questions whose answers exist in the text of a given topic
- Questions based on reading between the lines to draw inferences (for example, ‘why do you think…?)
- Questions based on critical thinking, which requires them to think of possibilities, solutions and options available (for example, ‘what do you think…?)
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Clarifying
As a group of students is reading a topic, they’re asked to pause and find the meaning of the words and phrases they encounter for the first time. This may be done through accessing a dictionary, teacher intervention or a group discussion, which encourages active participation. The goal is to learn to pronounce a new word, understand its meaning in the context of the topic and explore other meanings and/or uses of these words and phrases. A teacher needs to encourage students to explore with questions such as:
- I didn’t understand this phrase or word
- Could you clarify this section?
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Summarizing
Students learn to weed out information from a segment of the topic, identify the key points that matter, collate them together and describe the main idea in brief. The description is summarized in their own words to reinforce learning and display their understanding of the topic. Summarizing also helps a teacher gauge a student’s understanding of a topic. The teacher can ask probing questions such as:
- What is the topic suggesting?
- What is the important section of the topic?
- What are you learning from the topic?
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The reciprocal teaching strategy is an effective way to improve learning outcomes of students.
Reciprocal Teaching Examples
Now, let’s study some examples of reciprocal teaching that can be implemented in a classroom setting. To better understand how reciprocal teaching works in the classroom, consider the following example. A story, The Honest Woodcutter, with moral values is being taught to students. The teacher needs to form a group of four students to initiate the exercise. It’s assumed that students are learning the technique for the first time and hence, the teacher intervention may be higher.
First, show the chapter’s cover photo, introduce the title and the author’s name. Ask students what they think about the topic. What is the author’s purpose for writing this topic? This is predicting.
Next, read out the first page to the students and ask probing questions to explore difficult segments of the topic. Ask questions such as which do you think is the actual axe of the woodcutter? What do you think will happen if he chooses a silver axe?
When the second page has been read, discuss in detail the difficult words, phrases or segments of the topic. Ask more probing questions to clarify the concepts.
Finally, after ending the story and making sure the students have understood the difficult concepts of the story, help them identify the main idea and key points with the following probing questions:
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- What is the quality, according to the author, that every human being should develop?
- Why was the goddess impressed with the woodcutter?
- What happened at the end?
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The above questions will help you explain concepts to students and encourage them to write a summary of the story in their own words to demonstrate their understanding.
Embrace Reciprocal Teaching With Harappa
Harappa’s Inspiring Faculty Program can help you learn reciprocal teaching techniques along with other inspiring teaching methods to create impactful learning outcomes and build your innovative teaching skills. You may attempt to become adventurous and innovative in a classroom by combining microlearning and reciprocal teaching techniques.
