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Literacy Professional Learning Resource – Teaching Strategies

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Guided reading: Reciprocal teaching

In the following video clips teachers and their students demonstrate the strategies for reciprocal teaching:

  • predicting
  • clarifying
  • question generating
  • summarising

Read the transcript for the Guided Reading videos (HTM - 15Kb).

To organise students in their group learning activities, this teacher uses a ‘Taskboard’. Each student can easily see what they are should be working on during the reading session, from a list of four rotations for 4 groups. During each literacy block the students should experience at least two rotations

 

 

As the student’s needs become apparent, they are included in a ‘teaching rotation’ which gives the teacher time to concentrate on specific teaching points. These needs may include grammar, content, questioning techniques or tuning the students in to a particular text.

 

The teacher demonstrates with her teaching group, how to use prior knowledge, titles, pictures and group discussions to help the students feel familiar with the concepts of a new text, before reading it.

 

 

The teacher encourages the students to talk about words and phrases that may have been hard to understand during their initial reading of a new text. She encourages them to use text cues, glossaries, dictionaries and each other when discussing difficult words.

 

The teacher discusses with the students, how ‘question generating’ includes three levels of questions – literal, inferential and evaluative questions. She reminds the students what each kind of question is and how to use what they know to answer these questions.

 

 

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The teacher asks the students to think of a literal question from the text they have just read – as a means of testing their understanding. The teacher then reminds students how to ask and answer literal questions.

 

 

The teacher asks the students to think of an inferential question. The other students use the text and their understanding of the text to answer these questions. The teacher then reinforces the methods used to find answers to inferential questions

 

 

The teacher explains why an evaluative question is the most difficult kind of question because the answer is not included in the text. She encourages them to offer their own opinions, use discussions and debate responses with other group members

 

 

The teacher now asks the students to summarise verbally, what they have read and what they have learnt during this reading session. Later the students will use these summaries for their written work.

 

 

The teacher now asks one of the students in the group to take over as the leader and that student begins by asking the other students to predict what the next part of the text may be about. This session also demonstrates how the ‘student as leader’ covers all aspects of Guided reading Reciprocal teaching.

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Once everyone has participated in a leadership role, the teacher asks the students to write down what they have learnt during that reading session. They had already predicted ideas and now they will add to those ideas with new facts they have learnt.

 

 

The teacher explains that Guided reading Reciprocal teaching works best in a secondary school when she has the class for a double period, giving her time to organise group activities and then spend time with her teaching group. She finds this kind of teaching ideal when the text is difficult and when she needs the students to get key ideas from that text.

 

The teachers takes time to set up all the groups and carefully explains their work tasks for the session by using a ‘taskboard’. This way she can freely concentrate on her teaching group without interruption. The teacher also explains that the students’ involvement in their learning is enhanced by this style of teaching.

 

The teacher advises not to begin a teaching group until the whole class is familiar with the task board, the activities and the work expected of them. She explains that it is important to support the class to work independently and to use other members of the group to help rather than the teacher, so that she is not interrupted once she begins working with her teaching group.