Reciprocal Teaching

Abstract

Reciprocal teaching is an instructional model applied to written text in which students, working together in small groups, are empowered to take control of their own education processes by interrogating not only the text under investigation but also the larger process of learning itself. By breaking down the work of comprehension into stages, students can theoretically secure a better understanding of how learning actually happens. Initially advocated in the 1980s as a way to improve reading skills and learning confidence among students in the primary grades, the process has since been extended to the secondary school level and even to college.

Overview

The premise behind reciprocal teaching was (and still is) revolutionary. For generations, teachers in any discipline assigned blocks of reading material with the assumption that students could accomplish that reading task on their own initiative at home, that reading skills were largely equal within the classroom given that each student was in the same grade level. Reading, after all, was reading. Before the advent of television and the subsequent sharp deterioration of reading skills as successive generations of schoolchildren spent increasingly less time working on building reading competencies, teachers in the primary grades could no longer assume the long-established principal stages of reading—locating a text’s main points; understanding the implications of those main points; analyzing the implications of those points; and then applying those principal points to other, broader situations—were intuitive, simply part of how any student approached any piece of writing under study from basic texts of the creative imagination (stories, novels, poems, plays) to textbooks in any discipline, and word problems in mathematics. These stages did not need to be introduced or interrogated for their efficiency—they were simply what anyone did when they interacted with a written text. Whatever the curriculum from the sciences to history, reading was essential. Except for those students diagnosed with reading comprehension difficulties and/or learning disabilities, teachers simply assumed reading itself was a universal skill.

By the early 1980s, however, accumulating data began to suggest a far different picture—student reading skills were significantly impaired. Students simply could not understand written texts with any accuracy or consistency. Termed "cognitive failure," this dead-end moment revealed to the student (and the teacher) that education at that point was simply not possible; not grasping the meaning of a written text could not be ignored, could not be minimized, could not be addressed with tutors, could not be repaired by parental assistance. Being able to read, that is mastering the recognition of symbols as letters and groups of letters as words, no longer implied being able to understand what those words and sentences were actually saying. Although students understood the constructs of squiggles and lines that made up the alphabet and recognized the general operational architecture of a sentence, they struggled to distill from those language constructs their meaning, much less their purpose. Educators faced a systemic dilemma—the problem, although it tended to spike in underfunded and overcrowded school districts, generally cut across all traditional markers.

School children, without qualifying adjectives, were finding the ability to engage a text responsibly more and more a specialized skill. Teachers at all levels of instruction from the primary grades to high school faced the daunting challenge of using class time to tell students what texts were saying as the only way to move that information; of course, in the long term, that dynamic in turn would only create students who were essentially passive recipients of blocks of information whose reading skills would never necessarily improve. In turn, teachers grew increasingly frustrated by the progress of classroom instruction; morale in the profession dropped; supporting staff necessary to help students with low reading skills drained budgets; and in the process standardized test scores, long viewed as the most accurate way to assess a school’s success and a student’s comprehension, began what would turn into a nearly twenty-year downward spiral.

Perhaps the problem centered on conventional perceptions of the classroom as an instructor-centered construct where students had long been necessarily viewed as subordinate to the process of mastering material. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist, first posited that instruction itself is best managed as a dynamic between teacher and student and, more important, among students themselves. Learning is best conceived as a dialogue, a social interaction that encourages discussion, contribution, feedback, and mutual support. It was at the time a revolutionary premise. "Knowledge and meaning are the result of creative socializations arranged through negotiation and discourse among teachers and students, or students and students" (Choo, Eng & Ahman, 2011).

Within the progressively more authoritarian political environment of Russia, a theory that advocated dialogue, encouraged students to strengthen their understanding with the help of other students, and encouraged participation as key to educational evolution was widely discredited, and Vygotsky died from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-seven, largely unknown in the West. His theories were essentially rediscovered during the heyday of the counterculture in America in the late 1960s and 1970s. Here was an education template that appealed to that generation of free thinkers, a system that welcomed students to participate in their own education and that viewed cognition, that is learning, as a result of a cooperative interaction and redesigned the instructor into a facilitator, a support system rather than the autocratic center of the classroom. That theory, which became known as constructionism, that is building the understanding of material together and centering that process as the key to effective classroom management, was by definition controversial as it positioned students at the center of their own education process and necessarily challenged, even upended, generations of assumptions about the primacy of the teacher in a classroom.

Applications

As with so many groundbreaking theories, the premise underpinning reciprocal teaching is on its face simple: Take the steps readers traditionally performed when engaging a written text (understanding; analysis; clarification; and prediction) and assign one student in a small group to perform one of those tasks in the classroom itself as part of a collaborative effort to master an assigned reading. For students to take control of their own education, to become in essence authors of their own education, required teachers themselves to radically alter the perception of their role in a classroom. "Constructing educational practice around these processes…requires educators to think differently about education, authority, and learning" (Baxter, 2012). Reciprocal teaching externalizes the internal stages of reading. The students come to see how the act of reading actually works, what exactly it means to interact with a written text. This sort of educational approach, called metacognition, asserts that students should be made aware of what they are actually doing when they learn, to be aware of the process of thought and comprehension as a real-time function that the brain performs.

Within this template, the teacher, after carefully explaining the four-part concept and even demonstrating the cooperative nature of this sort of instruction, acts initially as a kind of facilitator, ensuring that each small group of students follows the protocol and stays on task. After the classroom adapts this process, educators point out, the teacher becomes less and less of a hovering presence and the students build their confidence, see exactly how the process of interacting with a text works, and within a relatively short period of time (research has suggested as little ten weeks of application) come to own their own education process and in turn approach texts on their own with for more competency and efficiency. "Learners learn to give and receive feedback with a peer, which results in an expansion of learner socialization skill; and…. learners learn to perform and analyze movements by observing the performance of the doer, comparing the performance against criteria, and drawing conclusions about the accuracy of the performance" (Chatoupis, 2015).

Consider how the theory might be applied in an actual classroom exercise. Take, for example, a fifth grade social studies/history class composed of twenty-five students whose competencies and skill sets are fairly distributed from A’s to D’s. The class is to review a three page reading assignment that covers Benjamin Franklin’s scientific achievements, most notably his work with the lightning rod. Within traditional classroom dynamics, the instructor expects to review the reading assignment, perhaps even give a pop quiz, to weed out the weaker readers because across-the-board reading competencies cannot be assumed. Then, perhaps supplemented with some application of technology (a video or a YouTube short), the instructor goes over the written material and hopes to maintain the students’ attention (and attention spans in students under the age of 12 have dwindled to on average just under eight minutes) sufficiently to make sure they get the main points. The actual reading of the passage itself becomes largely irrelevant.

If that classroom dynamic assumes a centering instructor and passive students, reciprocal teaching upends that construct. Education works better when it is dialogic, that is when material is tested, analyzed, questioned in a call and response template that can be done live in class. Students and teacher essentially alternate dominant position, share the control of the classroom itself. Early in the grading period, the teacher has reviewed the concept of reciprocal teaching as a way to commit the class to its protocol—thus the class is ready to execute the process. The instructor first breaks the classroom randomly into operating groups, four in each would be the optimum number. Instead of lecturing about the material, the instructor assigns a role to each member of the group: one will serve as the summarizer, responsible for highlighting the passage’s main points (what did Franklin actually do, when did he do it and under what conditions, how successful was he); a second will serve as the group’s interrogator, returning to the text, raising questions about passages that are murky or ideas that puzzle because "[q]uestioning promotes students’ comprehension, because students must understand what they have read to ask their peers knowledgeable questions" (Stricklin, 2011) (what exactly was the point of the key tied to a kite; what did Franklin think might happen? could he have been killed? why would a prominent politician be experimenting with science in the first place?); a third will serve as analyzer, providing some level of response to those questions to clarify the text’s more difficult passages; and the fourth will serve as the predictor, taking the group into the next level of analysis by posing questions about future actions and the implications of that text to a wider and broader context (what was the importance of this discovery, what are some of the applications, and what might Franklin have done next to continue his investigation).

Summarize, question, analyze, and predict: Without the usual stress of participating in a wider classroom dynamic or simply trying to pay attention to a teacher, this small group exercise encourages mutual support and discussion. The group will actually play out the internal processes of reading and will, collaboratively, construct a viable reading of the text. Unlike the intimidating expectations of working with an entire class, students respond to small group activity, they feel comfortable. With the direction of the instructor, the class will work toward a better understanding of reading itself until it can execute the process virtually independent of instructor direction, a process known as scaffolding. The students will have moved toward reading comprehensiveness. "As students gain proficiency with a strategy and move toward becoming independent comprehension strategy users, they assume more of the responsibility for applying the strategy while the teacher gradually releases his or her responsibility over the strategy’s application" (Pilonieta & Medina, 2009).

The mystery of reading will be clarified. Mastering the text will be efficient and cooperative—and the students, along the way, will develop respect for each other, will evolve their own socializing skills, and may even have fun. Subsequently, group roles will be redistributed and, eventually, the groups themselves can be reshuffled. Since the advent of the Internet and the resource storage capability of YouTube, a significant archive of actual classroom activities using reciprocal teaching has been made available to teachers to model their own classroom work. Allowing the students to grow and contribute to the work of the classroom has made reciprocal teaching an attractive model for underfunded schools with limited support staff—the teacher can in essence deputize the students themselves to help in the dynamic of instruction.

Virtually any kind of reading assignment can be worked using reciprocal teaching: essays, short stories and novels, poetry, textbooks, newspaper and magazine pieces; accumulating data indicates that this sort of engaged reading act even transfers to those materials the students elect to read outside the class for their own recreation. Indeed, reciprocal teaching has been applied in general math classes to address the difficulty students faced in approaching word problems. "The language of mathematics can often be a formidable barrier to understanding mathematical concepts, comprehension and problem-solving" (Meyer, 2014).

In fact, reciprocal teaching has even been applied to physical education by suggesting students who pair-off in gym class perform better (Chatoupis, 2015). It is at once an endorsement of this approach and a harsh critique of the steadily declining reading skills that this approach to helping students build their reading skills confidence has been adapted by college instructors who have also come to appreciate the depth of the challenge posed by a generation of students who have all but abandoned the commitment to reading as a life skill. "College students must be taught the skills to locate and analyze complicated information, to solve problems they encounter while reading, and to connect ideas and concepts" (Gruenbaum, 2012). Because success in college (and in a career for that matter) is tied strongly to reading skills, reciprocal teaching at that level seeks to moderate the growing attrition of incoming freshman—more than half of students who begin college work will not finish.

Viewpoints

Despite the accumulation of data that establishes the viability of reciprocal teaching, there are drawbacks. For the system to work effectively, the instructor must have considerable patience as the students work toward understanding the responsibility of group work. Students are not uniformly skilled—in small group work, those individuals with lower competency levels can feel embarrassed, left out, vulnerable to criticism. The system requires a long-term commitment to improvement on the part of the students themselves to resist turning the small group instructional units into improvised playtime. More disturbing, students assigned reading tasks can go online and retrieve much of the information on the assignment secondhand without committing to the responsibilities of in-class learning.

Advocates of constructivist teaching cite these concerns as trivial compared with the benefits: students discovering their own competencies in reading, understanding the actual process of interacting with a written text, and learning the value of cooperation. More promising, data has indicated that reciprocal teaching can assist those with disabilities by extending to them "social inclusion" into the larger classroom dynamic; reciprocal teaching can design strategies for students with intellectual and learning disabilities to join the mainstream classroom experience (Reichenberg, 2014). Educators have embraced the promise of reciprocal teaching in an era of declining reading skills. It is now an accepted theoretical element of university education programs that train future teachers, and its theoretical premise has engendered a generation of education textbooks, cutting-edge reading programs, and a plethora of online instruction tools.

Terms & Concepts

Cognitive Failure: The fail point in a student’s ongoing education in which the student no longer assimilates new material and can no longer process the expected evolution toward understanding.

Constructivism: In education, a theory that holds that learning is necessarily social, that understanding itself is best achieved through the collaborative efforts of teachers and students who collectively build, or construct, a viable understanding of material, that meaning itself can only be arrived at through the interaction of like-minded, if not like-talented people.

Dialogic Education: The theory that learning, whether analysis or problem solving, is best enhanced through the genuine question and answer process conducted between teacher and students and among students in which control of the classroom dynamic is permitted, even expected, to change.

Metacognition: In psychology, a method of thinking in which one is made aware of the process of analysis and discovery; in education, the deliberate introduction of the awareness of the process of learning into the classroom operation.

Scaffolding: In education, a system in which the instructor initially plays out or demonstrates an intended educational exercise and then, using that model, the students execute the same exercise with the teacher acting as facilitator.

Toolbox: In education, a term that refers to the specific competencies and skills of individual students that empowers the student to control their own education evolution.

Bibliography

Baxter Magolda, M. (2012). Building learning partnerships. Change 44 (1), 32–38. Retrieved December 1, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=70230722&site=ehost-live

Chatoupis, C. (2015). Pairing learners by companionship: Effects on motor skill performance and comfort levels in reciprocal style of teaching. Physical Education 72, 307–323. Retrieved December 1, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=111081529&site=ehost-live

Choo, T., Eng, T., & Ahman, N. (2011). Effects of reciprocal teaching strategies on reading comprehension. Reading Matrix 11 (2): 140-149. Retrieved December 1, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=61895441&site=ehost-live

Gruenbaum, E. (2012). Common literacy struggles with college students: Using the reciprocal teaching technique. Journal of College Reading & Learning, 42(2), 109–116. Retrieved December 1, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=109971228&site=ehost-live

Meyer, K. (2014). Making meaning in mathematics problem-solving using the reciprocal teaching approach. Literary Learning: The Middle Years, 22(2), 7–14. Retrieved December 1, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=96974860&site=ehost-live

Pilonieta, P., & Medina, A. (2009). Reciprocal teaching for the primary grades: "We can do it too!" Reading Teacher, 63(2), 120–129. Retrieved December 1, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=44618155&site=ehost-live

Reichenberg, M. (2014). The importance of structured text talks for students’ reading comprehension. Journal of Special Education and Rehabilitation, 15(3/4), 77–94. Retrieved December 1, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=98627038&site=ehost-live

Stricklin, K. (2011). Hands-on reciprocal teaching: A comprehension technique. Reading Teacher Techniques, 64(8), 620–625. Retrieved December 1, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=60759867&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2013). Better learning through structured teaching: A framework for the gradual release of responsibility. 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Lapp, D. (2014). Teaching students to read like detectives: Comprehending, analyzing and discussing text. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Oczkus, L. (2010). Reciprocal teaching: Powerful Strategies and lessons for improving reading comprehension. 2nd ed. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.