The Necessary Focus on Reading Comprehension

Throughout all grade levels, from primary school to higher education, teachers in every subject area share a unified goal of building students’ reading comprehension. Much of this can be attributed to rigor-driven standards that address the growing need for students to be critical, independent readers and thinkers as they move beyond the classroom and apply their skills with continuing education and real-world careers.

Even though the classroom can be a place that offers an abundance of opportunities to read a variety of texts, quantity doesn’t always correlate with increasing reading comprehension. A quick survey at the end of class or the following day might result in some students unable to recall what they read. If the students aren’t retaining the information, making connections, or comprehending the text, the process of reading may be performed mindlessly as some students are merely going through the motions.

Engage Students in the Reading Process Through Reciprocal Teaching

While increasing the amount a person reads is one way to build comprehension, teachers are often looking for techniques to build comprehension while reading as a whole class. To get meaningful results, students should be fully engaged in the reading process and incorporate close reading strategies. Reciprocal teaching is a valuable discussion technique for all content teachers to learn. It can be applied to every subject area to improve reading comprehension from grade levels spanning from K-12 to higher education.

Read about meaningful engagement with texts through close reading strategies.

Why Reciprocal Teaching?

Reciprocal teaching is a great strategy to incorporate into the classroom for three reasons:

1. It’s effective.
2. It’s easy to implement.
3. It’s engaging.

As a scaffolded classroom discussion technique, reciprocal teaching builds comprehension through four strategies implemented during the reading process: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. These are strategies that good readers already engage in while reading, so these natural processes should not feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable to students.

Apply Consistently for Meaningful Results

Reciprocal teaching is best when done as a consistent practice within a classroom, grade level, school community, or district-wide. The benefits of consistency mean that the students know what to expect and their role in the practice.

Since the practice is versatile regarding the subject area goals, teacher pedagogy, and learning tasks, it can be adjusted and applied to best fit the classroom needs. Therefore, reciprocal teaching can be used as teacher-modeled instruction, whole-class participation, guided small reading groups, and partner practice.

Teachers should try to practice reciprocal teaching in their classrooms 2–3 times weekly with a variety of texts such as picture books, short stories, chapters from novels and textbooks, articles, and informational texts.

An Invigorating Boost for Rigorous Reading

Lori D. Oczkus’s book, Reciprocal Teaching at Work: Powerful Strategies and Lessons for Improving Reading Comprehension emphasizes the positive impact reciprocal teaching has made over decades of use within learning environments. Oczkus refers to reciprocal teaching as a “reading vitamin boost” that energizes and invigorates students for rigorous reading tasks that they encounter in the classroom.

The proof is reflected in the results of Dr. John Hattie’s research (2008), showing consistent reading comprehension growth of .74 per year with reciprocal teaching. That type of growth is double what would typically occur for the average student within a single school year. In a time of significant learning loss for many students, reciprocal teaching can be the much-needed teaching technique that results in meaningful academic gains.

Implementing Reciprocal Teaching

When reading sections of an assigned text, students lead the classroom through their application of each of the strategies through the following ways:

1. Predicting: Students make an initial scan of the text and come up with predictions. As they continue reading, they can verify, adjust, and reflect on their predictions. Tracking initial projections and how they shifted throughout their reading is a meaningful practice highlighting how thinking can change as new information is presented.
2. Questioning: Students generate genuine inquiries to deepen their knowledge and understanding of concepts they are curious about while reading the text. Big questions about the text can further the learning on a topic guided by the students’ interests.
3. Clarifying: Students identify unfamiliar words, phrases, and references by utilizing context clues, footnotes, dictionary definitions, and research to determine the meaning. Teachers can add terms to classroom word walls to show the students’ growing vocabulary due to reciprocal teaching.
4. Summarizing: Students write a brief synopsis by selecting what stood out to them as meaningful information presented in the text. Engaging in a discussion about why they think something is essential can promote academic dialogue and exchange of ideas.

In initial implementation and with challenging content, teachers can scaffold this process while offering support through modeling the tasks and guiding students through their application of strategies. Over time, the students will become metacognitive as they become more reflective in applying this approach throughout the reading process.

Apply Reciprocal Teaching with Glose for Education

The use of technology with reciprocal teaching helps to scaffold the process and leverage digital literacy in the classroom. Glose for education is a fun and interactive e-reading platform that emphasizes the social aspect of reading. Incorporating socialization in learning is so beneficial to students as shown with increasing levels of reading comprehension as a result of reciprocal teaching. Glose for education creates opportunities for students to record observations to share as the class digitally interacts with one another within the text.

Utilized as whole-class reading of a novel, within literature circles, or independent reading, the strategies of predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing can be easily done with Glose’s interactive tools. The students can use the highlighting tool and assign colors for each strategy. They can create annotations to make predictions, generate questions, clarify uncertain terms, and summarize text sections. Finally, the classroom can interact with these annotations by creating comment responses and textmoji reactions.

The quick and accessible incorporation of reciprocal teaching in classroom practices, new and old, makes it an easy, engaging, and beneficial strategy to implement with students right away for meaningful results.

References

Hattie, John. Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Oczkus, Lori D. Reciprocal Teaching at Work: Powerful Strategies and Lessons for Improving Reading Comprehension. 3rd ed., Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2018.