Reciprocal teaching

Reciprocal teaching is a form of teaching with the aim of promoting reading comprehension .

Action

The text to be worked on in the session is broken down into individual sections by the instructor . These sections are dealt with one after the other and only handed over to the participating students when they are completed .

In each session, a different person takes on the role of teacher for a section of text (usually the teacher at the beginning, later the students). The teacher is responsible for moderating the round and executing the strategies below. Each section of text is processed sequentially using the following strategies:

Ask questions ( questioning ): This strategy is used to check ( self-monitoring ) the understanding of the section. The questions asked should ideally not relate directly to the information given in the text, but should go beyond the scope of the text (questions that the text does not answer directly).

Combining ( Summarizing ): Summarizing is also used to check understanding of the text. The aim is to teach students that if they are unable to summarize, they have not understood the text properly.

Clarifying ( Clarification ): In contrast to summarizing, the aim here is not to check the global understanding of the text, but rather whether individual words or sentences in the section have remained unclear.

Prediction ( prediction ): Students are asked to make a guess, which the author might consider in the next section.

Even if the teaching role is no longer taken over by the teacher himself, the teacher continues to offer help, criticize and intervene if problems arise. If the performance level of the students improves, the support should be reduced further and further ( fading ).

The teacher should also intervene in such a way that a metacognition arises in the students. Specifically, she could ask, for example, why one summary is better or worse than another. It thus promotes the explication and further development of so-called implicit theories (prototheories) via a good summary.

theory

The theoretical background of reciprocal teaching is cognitive apprenticeship .

The strategies listed above are intended to help students establish a conceptual model of reading. It should be led away from the fact that reading consists of recognizing and pronouncing words. Reciprocal teaching assumes that reading also consists of asking questions, predicting and summarizing and evaluating whether a text or a certain text passage has been understood.

A critical factor is that students can observe the teacher as an expert reads and critically compare their own reading behavior with that of the teacher. It is crucial here, however, that the teacher also expresses his own thoughts and thus the students gain access to the actual cognitive processes.

Empirical Findings

Empirical findings show that the method is highly effective, even if the teachers adapt them to actual needs. However, teachers report that the various strategies are not being used adequately by students. So the questions or summaries asked are very close to the text.

literature

A. Collins, JS Brown, SE Newman: Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching the Crafts of Reading, Writing and Mathematics. In: LB Resnick (Ed.): Knowing, learning and instruction. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ 1989, pp. 453-494.

Individual evidence

↑ Hacker, Douglas J. & Tenent, Arnette (2002). Implementing reciprocal teaching in the classroom: Overcoming obstacles and making modifications. Journal of Educational Psychology , 94 (4), p. 699.

[1] Hacker, Douglas J. & Tenent, Arnette (2002). Implementing reciprocal teaching in the classroom: Overcoming obstacles and making modifications. Journal of Educational Psychology , 94 (4), p. 699.