1. Scaffolding: Providing support, coaching, and corrective feedback for students as they begin to use reciprocal teaching strategies.
2. Think-alouds: Modeling the use of cognitive strategies by pausing to reflect aloud in front of students. Making thinking visible to students.
3. Metacognition: Thinking about one’s own thinking. Through reciprocal teaching students learn to reflect on their own cognitive processes.
4. Collaborative learning: Students work together to construct meaning from text.

Source: Reciprocal Teaching at Work: Strategies for Improving Reading Comprehension by Lori Oczkus, IRA, 2003.

No special materials are required to implement the reciprocal teaching model. Because reciprocal teaching was designed to be an interactive dialogue, most of the time is spent talking! Chart paper and/or an overhead are helpful for modeling during whole- or small-group introductory or practice lessons. Paper-pencil activities can provide reinforcement as students are introduced to the four strategies. Once students begin integrating the four strategies, however, the emphasis is almost strictly on reading and dialoguing.

Research has clearly shown that when students are asked to learn information without actively using procedures to construct understanding, they ultimately forget the content. Through reciprocal teaching, teachers explicitly guide students through the meaning-making process.

Reciprocal teaching has a well-documented record of improving students’ reading comprehension proficiency (NIH, 2000). Palinscar and Brown (1986) found that when the reciprocal teaching model was used as an intervention technique with struggling students for as few 15-20 days, their reading comprehension scores improved from 30% to 80%. Follow-up testing indicated that these students maintained these scores up to a year later.

1. Predicting: Readers use background knowledge and clues from the pictures/text to anticipate what will happen next or what they will learn.
2. Questioning: Readers formulate main idea and inference questions using the question words who, what, why, when, where, how, and what if.
3. Clarifying: Readers identify words, phrases, or ideas that are difficult or confusing. They learn to apply fix-up strategies to solve problems as they read.
4. Summarizing: Readers construct an overall meaning of text selection by providing a clear, concise summary of what they have read.

Reciprocal teaching is a research-based instructional model that was developed in 1984 by Annemarie Palinscar and Ann L. Brown. It is a method that utilizes four comprehension strategies—predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing—to help students construct meaning from text. The focus of reciprocal teaching is on the interactive dialogue between students. It is reciprocal in nature because students in a reciprocal teaching group take turns leading the discussion and guiding the group through the four strategies.

Click to view video demonstrations of reciprocal teaching in action:

• Part 1 
• Part 2

Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist, believed that what is learned must be taught. He proposed a theory called the zones of development. Every child has a cognitive zone of actual development and a zone of proximal development. Vygotsky argued that we can teach students something new only when the task is within their zone of proximal development. He believed that all learning must proceed from the concrete to the abstract, from the visible and external to the internal. He also believed that almost any child can and will learn if given the right opportunities and instruction.