Reciprocal Teaching

Reciprocal Teaching is a process that was first developed for small- group work in remedial classrooms. It has been adapted for whole-class and peer-led group work in larger classrooms. It helps students monitor their comprehension and involves the same apprenticeship model as the Strategic Learning Initiative. Internalizing of the 4 key elements of comprehension-questioning, clarifying summarizing and predicting is the aim.
Questioning
One exercise, called ReQuest, has the apprentice reader ask questions about the text they are reading, imagining they are a teacher. What would they want their students to learn from the text? One student is chosen to ask their question to the class, and choose the correct answer from those given from the rest of the class. The person with the best answer asks the next question. For complete participation, no one can answer more than once until all have answered at least once. This exercise usually would entail a class discussion about which answer is the best or correct answer.

Master readers (teachers) discuss 4 types of questions with the students.
1. Right there questions- answer is right there in text, reader just needs to copy it down
2. Pulling it together questions- the answer is in the texts, but in different areas and the reader needs to pull it together from different locations in the text
3. Author and me questions- Answers are not in the text. Reader must combine his own knowledge and use information in text to find answer. For example, the text may say that someone took shower, worried they might miss the bus for school. The question "what time of day was it?" requires the reader to know that school starts in the morning and combine their knowledge with information from the text to find answer.
4. On my own questions- Answer not in text, reader may use text to inform their answer but it comes from their own knowledge. For example, "Should parents wake their children up for school?"

The first two questions are categorized as "in the text questions" with a right answer. The last two questions are "in my mind" questions and may have more than one right answer.
Now the activity for the class is "Question Around" and the class does the previous activity but labels the questions according to the 4 labels above.

Summarizing
Most students have experience with summarizing but do not have explicit knowledge on ways to determine what is important enough to include in the summary. To help make this visible to the students, teachers developed a list of what makes a good summary. The students agreed that a good summary should be shorter than the text, contain important information but leave out details and examples.
Signal words that would give the students structure to what they were looking for were detailed. Word such as first, then, finally helped the students mentally organize the text. Peer review of the summaries gave the students a safe way to learn what others felt were important ideas and which ideas they may have included that weren't deemed necessary by their classmate. Discussion and referral back to the text would then ensue.