Role of the Teacher: to provide modeling, scaffolding, feedback, and explanation for the students. Both the teacher and the students cooperate in making efforts of understanding the material that is being taught.

Clarification: in this stage, questions should be formulated in order to define words or phrases that are hard to understand, unfamiliar, or ones that could be misinterpreted.

Questioning: why and how questions should be asked to create a shared understanding of the paragraph or section. These questions should lead to additional questions and result in a discussion within the group. If a disagreement arises between the students, it may be necessary to reread the passage for better understanding.

Summary: in this stage, important details should be pointed out and paraphrased in a way that helps the students get the main idea of what is being read. This stage helps the students make sure they know what they just read and gives them ideas on what is to come in the next paragraph.

Prediction: students are encouraged to make a guess on what the author is going to talk about next. These predictions should be made using the prior knowledge the students learned during the previous steps. This provides an opportunity for students to critically assess the author's intent and provoke imagination.

1. When introducing this technique, spend sufficient time on each strategy (one strategy per day).
2. Ensure students know each strategy before starting reciprocal teaching lessons (quiz).
3. Passages of 100 words are sufficient for students who are still learning comprehension strategies (fourth-graders).
4. Initially, teachers will find it easier to go paragraph by paragraph; eventually, whole passages may be read at a time without stopping.
5. At the paragraph level, students come up with one important question and one good summary sentence.
6. At the passage level, students come up with 3 or 4 important questions and 2 or 3 ideas to support the summary.
7. Four to six students per group.
8. The role of teacher should be rotated so each student has the opportunity to lead.
9. Most effective when carried out over a long period of time.

References

Andrews, Jean F. Deaf Children's Acquisition of Prereading Skills Using the Reciprocal Teaching Procedure. Technical Report No. 350. Cambridge, Mass.; Illinois Univ., Urbana. Center for the Study of Reading.

Carter, Carolyn J. (1997). Why reciprocal teaching. In Educational Leadership. March 1997, v54, n6.

Kilngner, Janette Kettmann, and Sharon Vaughn (1996). Reciprocal teaching of reading comprehension strategies for students with learning disabilities who use English as a second language. The Elementary School Journal. Jan 1996, v96, n3.

Palincsar, A.S. (1986). Reciprocal teaching. In Teaching reading as thinking. Oak Brook, IL: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.

Palincsar, A.S., & Brown, A.L. (1985). Reciprocal teaching: Activities to promote read(ing) with your mind.In T.L. Harris & E.J. Cooper (Eds.), Reading, thinking and concept development: Strategies for the classroom. New York: The College Board.

Palincsar, A.S., & Klenk, L.J. (1991). Dialogues promoting reading comprehension. In B. Means, C. Chelemer, and M. S. Knapp (Eds.), Teaching advanced skills to at-risk students. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.