Reciprocal Teaching
Overview
When students explain to others, they deepen their understanding and gain confidence in their learning. Through reciprocal teaching, learners practice guiding group discussions using four learning strategies: predicting, generating questions, clarifying, and summarizing.
Example: Use This Strategy in the Classroom
Watch this Reading Rockets video of how elementary students use reciprocal teaching to dive deeply into a reading discussion. By facilitating a highly participatory discussion over a shared text, students focus their Attention on comprehending the text. Students also practice their Verbal Reasoning when using the four reciprocal teaching strategies.
Design It into Your Product
Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Cooperative Learning Strategies
When peers work cooperatively to practice writing letters, words, and eventually longer sentences, their Foundational Writing Skills, including spelling and writing quality, improve.
Flexible grouping is a classroom practice that temporarily places students together in given groups to work together, with the purpose of achieving a given learning goal or activity.
As students walk through stations working in small groups, the social and physical nature of the learning supports deeper understanding.
As students work with and process information by discussing, organizing, and sharing it together, they deepen their understanding.
To promote acceptance of learning diversity, students explore learning tools and strategies to see how they work and why they and others might use them.
Respectful redirection, or error correction, outlines a clear and concise way that educators can provide feedback on behaviors that need immediate correction, in a positive manner.
Students develop reading skills by listening to and speaking with others in informal ways.
