Strategies and Methods of Reciprocal Teaching as Defined, Revised, and Implemented by Individual Teachers Across the K-l2 Spectrum

Reciprocal Teaching is an instructional activity that takes place between students and teachers while reading segments of text. The dialogue is lead by the actions of predicting, clarifying, questioning, and summarizing. The teachers trains the students in the four actions, or strategies, and then gradually releases responsibility to the students according to their maturity and readiness levels. The purpose of this paper was to examine how three teachers from a school district in Minnesota used the concept of Reciprocal Teaching in their classrooms. The first objective was to discover how each teacher defined the concept. From there the researched focused on what aspects of the strategy each teacher felt was most useful, how they modified the concepts to fit their individual teaching styles, and what activities they chose to use to integrate Reciprocal Teaching into their cumiculum. The findings indicated that all three teachers defined the strategy in a similar wdy, used similar strategies with their students, but differed in their modifications due to age and maturity levels of their students. They all found that there were limitations to the strategy, but agreed that they will continue using the concepts with their students and would like to see others do so as well