Christina's Kinder Blossoms: Book Study Chapter 1

Welcome to our book study for Reciprocal Teaching at Work K-12 by Lori Oczkus. Stick around, read, and then link up your own post at the bottom of this page! This is week 1 of 5 so you have plenty of time to join!
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The author begins by telling us that as students continue to struggle with understanding various text, research concludes that students need to be taught comprehension skills. Research supports reciprocal teaching for increasing student comprehension.

Reciprocal teaching is designed to supplement other teaching strategies.
It "is a scaffolded discussion technique built on four strategies..." It works in all grade levels and for both fiction and nonfiction text. The four strategies were developed based on what good readers do to comprehend text. They are used in combination with one another in any order.

Here are the strategies...

Predicting
While many students are familiar with this task, they often take it to mean guessing. However, it involves a preview of the text and incorporating background knowledge to make "logical predictions."

Prediction strategies vary based on text.
For example, fiction not only involves viewing cover, title, and illustrations, but story elements such as setting, character, problem, and events.

Nonfiction, on the other hand, involves viewing headings, tables, pictures, and text structure such as main idea and details, or cause and effect.

Questioning
Teachers need to teach students to ask different types of questions about the text. For example, teachers need to demonstrate the difference between recall type questions and higher level thinking questions. It is also suggested that students have explicit modeling of questioning during the reading process. Students need to learn questioning techniques for asking about main ideas, details, and inferences.

Clarifying
Clarifying is the ability to check your understanding of the text. To be successful in this skill, students need to realize when they are struggling with an concept or word and have the skills to overcome these struggles. Again, teaching this skill will be necessary for student success. The use of sentence starters is suggested for this process.

Summarizing
This strategy is among the most difficult for students to master. It is recommended that teachers engage students by using more "friendly" summarizing strategies. This includes drawing, writing five important parts, or summarizing smaller chunks of text. The author includes sentence starters for the purpose of guiding this process.

Image by Donna Ahlrich, Charmaine Broe-MacKenzie and Jim Brown (2005).

The next section of the book includes two lengthy tables with suggestions on how to handle problems implementing reciprocal teaching and the four strategies.

The author goes on to explain that there are four instructional strategies necessary for successful implementation of reciprocal teaching. The first is scaffolding which can be simplified with these teacher steps, "I do, we do, you do."
The second strategy is a think-aloud. These need to occur regularly during teacher modeling. The third is metacognition. This entails students thinking about what reciprocal strategies helped them and why.
Finally, cooperative learning is an important component of reciprocal teaching.

The final section of the chapter discusses the use of reciprocal teaching in the three tiers of RTI and how to be effective doing so.

At the end of chapter one, there is a reference to appendix A which provides reciprocal teaching assessment tools to assess your student's skills.