Philicia Randolph

Jeanice Lewis

Outline:

Introduction

Reciprocal Teaching & Comprehension Enhancement and Monitoring in Reading

Key Components of Reciprocal Teaching

The Role of The Teacher & Student

Key Study Findings

Educational Implications

Conclusion

References

Reciprocal teaching is an instructional method designed to use prior knowledge and interactive dialogues to promote comprehension development of children in natural settings. Designed by Annemarie S. Palincsar & Ann Brown in the early 1980's, the theoretical underpinnings of the concept are found in constructivism and Lev Vygotsky's Social Development Theory. In their research, Palincsar & Brown (1984), assert that Reciprocal Teaching can be used to not only help poor comprehenders improve their rate of comprehension, but to enable them to maintain that progress over time and to transfer those critical thinking skills to different learning tasks (p. 167).

Palincsar & Brown (1984)conceptualize comprehension as a product of three main factors: considerate texts, an overlap between prior knowledge and the content of the text, and those strategies used to enhance and overcome comprehension failures (p. 118). Focusing on the strategic aspects of comprehension, Palincsar & Brown make a key distinction between automaticity and debugging. They relate that automaticity enables mature readers to detect reading failure, while debugging enables mature readers to slow down and apply fix-up strategies to comprehend the meaning of the text. This type of strategic reading requires students to monitor themselves and their comprehension as they read and to adopt behaviors that will enhance and foster their understanding of the text. The goal of Reciprocal Teaching is to enhance comprehension and self-monitoring of novice and academically weak students in reading.

Reciprocal Teaching is designed to teach students four comprehension-fostering and comprehension monitoring activities: questioning, summarizing, clarifying, and predicting. There are four key aspects of Reciprocal Teaching that distinguish it from other reading strategies. First, it ensures that students are provided with reading materials at their zone of proximal development and trained with the use of expert scaffolding. This training feature enables them to assimilate texts that are neither too easy nor too diffult for them. From this perspective, students are encouraged to work at their instructional reading level, as opposed to their independent reading level or frustration reading level. The next important feature of Reciprocal Teaching can be referred to as role-switching. In Reciprocal Teaching, students are assigned to switch roles with the teacher. Insead of being responsible soley for comprehension answers, which seems to be the bottom-line of many approaches to reading comprehension, students are required to inquire and to respond "even if the level of which they are capable is not yet that of an expert" (Palincsar & Brown, 1984, p. 169). Another critical aspect of Reciprocal Teaching is the role that appropriate feedback plays in the strategy. Required to function as experts in the educational enviornment, teachers must be able to make on-line diagnosis during a lesson (p. 169) and be able to provide the kind of feedback that either corrects or clarifies a student's understanding or helps to usher them to the next stage of their cognitive development, while training students to provide feedback as they assume the role of teacher. The final aspect of Reciprocal Teaching that separates it from other strategies is the maintenance, generalization, and transfer component. The strategy trains students in a manner that helps them achieve and maintain high levels of comprehension over time, to generalize those skills across settings, and to transfer those skills to other conceptual domains (pp. 167-168).

Caption: This graphic illustrates the Fabulous Four strategies of Reciprocal Teaching: predicting, questioning, clarifying and summarizing, which are used together to increase reading comprehension. Arrows are pointing in both directions towards each strategy because the strategies can be used in any order. Image by Donna Ahlrich, Charmaine Broe-MacKenzie and Jim Brown (2005).

Traditionally, the teacher plans and presents learning objectives to students to master. As students master the concepts, they are taught additional skills and concepts. When students fail to master the learning objectives, the teacher performs remediation until the student either masters the concepts or it is determined that the student lacks the academic capacity to perform the specified learning objectives. At that time, the teacher may elect to move on to a new set of learning objectives for that student, modify the curriculum, or refer the student for intensive remediation or Exceptional Student Education services. This traditional perception of the "absolute" role of the teacher is seen in many behavioral and supposedly "teacher-proof" approaches to teaching and learning (i.e., direct instruction). However, in Reciprocal Teaching, the teacher initially acts as a model (with the underlying belief that he/she will be able to reach every student), modeling the desired cognitive behaviors for the student, who may essential start out as a passive observer. As the student gains cognitive competence, the teacher switches from the role of a model to that of a sympathetic coach, molding active and engaged leaners. As the students gain confidence and competence witht the strategies, they take over the teaching role and model the strategy use for their peers (Richek, Caldwell, Jennings, & Lerner, 2002). In the traditional teaching model, teachers are viewed as the sole dispensers of information. Children are not seen as already possessing knowledge and are viewed as sponges that must soak up the information presented to them in order to develop as learners. Yet, with Reciprocal Teaching, teachers and children are held mutually responsible and accountable for the teaching and learning that occurs in the learning enviornment.

In the original two quasi-experimental studies on Reciprocal Teaching, Palincsar & Brown (1984) observed the following common trends. First, they noticed clear qualitative evidence of improvements in student dialogue exchanges. They found that there were large and reliable quantitative improvements on comprehension tests observed by all but one student in the first study and all students in the second study. They determined that the effects were durable because the maintenance probes showed no drop in the level of student performance even after eight weeks. They observed generalized effects to the classroom setting and students that were well-behind their peers were able to match the performance of their peers. The researchers found that the training resulted in a reliable transfer to laboratory tasks that differed from the training assessment tasks. They noticed sizable improvements in standardized comprehension scores. Also, the researchers could not find any difference in the success of the program as it relates to setting. In the first study, students were trained by the experimentor in a pull-out type setting, while students were taught with teachers in actual classrooms in the second study. After questioning teachers about the program, Palincsar & Brown found that teachers liked the program and planned to use it.

Given the reported success of Reciprocal Teaching (Palinscar & Brown, 1984; Alfasi, 1998), there are several important educational implications in terms of how constructivist practices like, Reciprocal Teaching, could transform the current educational climate of skill-based/driven or bottom-up approaches to reading. First, advocates of Reciprocal Teaching believe that skills should not be practiced as isolated activities. They perceive reading as a socially constructed activity and believe that it should be undertaken in the context of actual reading with the goal of understanding and remembering text content. Next, proponents for this model realize the vast differences between novice and mature readers and understand the main difference that separates them is how they approach the act of reading and the strategies that they bring to the reading process. In this model, the teacher is perceived as an expert and is expected to be knowledgable about cognitive developmental levels, informal assessments, and is trusted to make key professional judgements on the spot. In addition, teachers using this model do not allow students to remain passive observers in their classrooms, nor do they allow low IQ or a history of poor academic performance to stand as an excuse for continued failure. They believe that all students, if appropriately taught, can learn.

One of the impressive features of the Reciprocal Teaching studies is that teachers were able to directly witness the growth of students, who formerly had great trouble assimilating social studies and science content materials. This raises the question as to where general deficiencies occurred, because the deficiencies did not appear to be representative of the students' ability to learn as much as it appeared to reflect ineffective instruction. Finally, the training aspects and success of the Reciprocal Teaching model helped students, accustomed to academic failure, perceive themselves as learners and mutual contributers to the general learning process. In Study 2, Palinscar & Brown (1984) provide qualitative data on each of the students in the Reciprocal training group. One of the particular students discussed, Alice, stands out because of her Science teacher's perception of her as a student and the impact that perception potentially had on her perception of herself as a learner in her content area classes. According to Palinscar & Brown, her science teacher believed that she was a "good kid, but. . ." (p. 155). His complaint of her was that "all she did was sit there during class, and he was doubtful that much could be done to help her." (p. 155). Of their recount of Alice, however, they remark that Alice was delighted to participate in the study and "gleefully reported after several days of intervention that she had been the only one in history class who had been able to define what a summary was. They report that she said, "I raised my hand, the teacher looked around, but I was the only one. He had to call on me, and I got it right!" (p. 155).

In conclusion, Reciprocal Teaching applies constructivist and social developmental theory principles to the teaching of reading. Reading is seen as a socially constructed and comprehensive activity, that by no means can be taught effectively as isolated skills. Recipocal Teaching and its top-to-bottom approach to reading challenges exisiting practice in teacher education, challenges how we respond to individual differences and attributes of learners, and presents an alternative approach to literacy pedagogy and practice.

References

Alfasi, M. (1998). Reading for meaning: The efficacy of reciprocal teaching in fostering reading comprehension in high school students in remedial reading classes. American Educational Research Journal, 35(2), 309-332.

Cole, M., John-Steiner, V., Scribner, S., & Souberman, E. (Eds.). (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Bos, C., & Vaughn, S. (1998). Strategies for teaching students with learning and behavior problems (4th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Joyce, B., Weil, M., & Calhoun, E. (2004). Models of teaching (7th ed.). Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Palincsar, A.L., & Brown, A.L. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension monitoring activities. Cognition And Instruction, 1(2) 117-175.

Richek, M.A., Caldwell, J.S., Jennings, J.H., & Lerner, J.W. (2002). Reading problems: Assessment and teaching strategies (4th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Thomas, R.M. (2005). Comparing theories of child development (6th ed.). California: Thomson Wadsworth.

External Links

For more information on Reciprocal Teaching, go to: http://depts.washington.edu/centerme/recipro.htm

To view a Reciprocal Teaching movie w

Commentary by Sara McGinnis

This is one of the best wiki pages that I have ever read. I am a firm believer in Reciprocal teaching. I have used it for two years now in my classroom and in afterschool tutoring programs. It gives the students a chance to take the learning in their own hands. This topic was well written and researched. I was very impressed with the external pages and the chart. This is a page that would be great to use with teachers that don't know much about this topic.

The only problem I saw was that you are missing a space between (1984)conceptualize.

That was the ONLY problem that I saw.

Again, Great job girls!

Sara

Commentary by Annette Gebhardt

This wiki was extremely well written and the resources, video and links were superb!! I learned so much about Reciprocal Teaching that I had not known and was given a lot to think about. The chart was excellent and was something that could be used at a glance for a good reminder of the process. Each step in the process was clearly and thoroughly defined.

A couple of nitpicky things: in the Key Components paragraph, you forgot the "t" in Instead and I think "soley" should be spelled "solely." Environment was misspelled. An extra "t" was added to with in The Role of the Teacher & the Student paragraph. In Educational Implications "contributers" should be spelled "contributors." In the same paragraph, I would remove the commas ...like, Reciprocal Teaching, could tranform... because the sentence does not function without those two words. These were surely just typos and took nothing away from the content. Well Done!!!

commentary by [Christy S. Nobles]

Overall, this was an exceptional wiki. I found it to be very informative and very well written. The few errors that were mentioned above were not profound enough to distract from the wiki. I enjoyed the links and the video and found that it added to my understanding of Reciprocal Teaching. I think this is one of the best wikis I have review this semester and I feel that you have zoned in on the importanat points for the topic. Great job, ladies!