Reciprocal teaching

Reciprocal Teaching is a form of teaching with the aim to promote reading comprehension.

Procedure

The medium to be at the meeting of the instructional text is divided into sections for teachers. These sections are successively treated and given to the pupils until processing.

At each meeting a different person takes over the role of the teacher for a text section ( usually at the beginning of the teacher himself, and later the students ). The person who takes over the role of the teacher is responsible for moderating the round and the execution of the below mentioned strategies. Each text section is successively processed with the following strategies:

Even if the teacher's role is no longer accepted by the teacher himself, the teacher continues to provide assistance to, criticized, and intervenes when problems arise. Improves the performance level of the students, the support should always be further reduced (fading).

The teacher should also intervene in such a way that metacognition results from the students. Specifically, he could ask, for example, why a summary is better or worse than another summary. He thus encourages the explication and development of sogenannnten implicit theories (proto theories ) about a good summary.

Theory

The theoretical background of the Reciprocal Teaching is the Cognitive Apprenticeship.

The strategies listed above are intended to help students establish a conceptual model of reading. It should be routed away from the fact that reading consists of recognizing and pronouncing words. Reciprocal Teaching assumes that reading also of questions, predictions, and summarizing and evaluations is whether a text or a particular passage has been understood.

A critical factor is that students can observe the teacher as an expert in reading going on, and compare their own behavior when reading critically with the teacher. The key here, however, that the teacher pronounce his own thoughts and so gain access to the actual cognitive processes students.

Empirical Findings

Empirical findings suggest is a high effectiveness of the method, even if they are adapted to the actual needs of teachers. Teachers, however, report that the various strategies are not adequately applied by students. So the questions or summaries are very close to the text.