Adapting Strategies of The Reciprocal Teaching Method for Early Learners

The Reciprocal Teaching Method is an excellent way to help children with their reading comprehension. This method focuses on four critical comprehension skill domains: generating questions, clarifying, making predictions, and summarizing.

In this post, you’ll come to better understand what reciprocal teaching is and how this method can be adapted for early learners.

What is the Reciprocal Teaching Method?

Reciprocal teaching is a structured and collaborative strategy to help build and automate important comprehension skills that teach children how to self-monitor their understanding as they read. In other words, it is an excellent way to promote collaboration and build students’ metacognition with reading.

This teaching method is comprised of four critical reading comprehension domains: predicting, clarifying, summarizing, and generating questions, and was developed by Palincsar and Brown in the 1980s. The method involves both the teacher and students taking on specific roles during group discussions of a text which promotes active engagement with the text and promotes greater understanding and retention.

A simple way to implement this method is to think of it as a total of four steps: modeling, classroom practice; role designation practice; and role rotation. Take a look at the chart below to see what is involved in each of these steps.

Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies in Four Steps

STEP 1	STEP 2	STEP 3	STEP 4
Modelling	Classroom Practice	Role Designation Practice	Role Rotation
Skill domains are first introduced by being modeled during reading sessions together as a class by the teacher	Children are given the opportunity to practice these strategies as a whole class	Groups of 4-6 children are made and each student is given a role to practice	Roles change for the next assigned text or paragraph, to allow every child to practice each of these four comprehension skills
Introductory Phase	Introductory Phase	Implementation Phase	Implementation Phase

Phases and Steps of the Reciprocal Teaching Method

Essentially, reciprocal teaching is divided into two phases: the introductory phase consisting of pre-teaching and whole classroom practice, and the implementation phase involving role designation practice and role rotation.

During the implementation phase, children are divided into small groups of four or five students. Within these groups, children get an opportunity to take on the role of the teacher by being given one of the four roles: the predictor; the questioner; the summarizer; or the clarifier. Children are encouraged to underline or highlight parts of the text relating to their role as they read and can refer back to these words or passages during group discussions.

While this method was originally designed for seventh-grade students, reciprocal reading has been adapted for primary students down to grade one. Further in this post, you’ll learn ways you can simplify aspects of this method even further and implement them with kindergarteners! Starting early in coaching your little learner with comprehension tasks is just plain brilliant and we’ll discuss why!

Teacher reading to group of kindergarten students

Getting Children Excited About Their Roles

Introducing…

Patrick Penguin, Quinn Quokka, Summer Salamander; and Clara Kitty: Our cute characters for the roles students take on when using the reciprocal teaching method

Patrick Penguin – The Predictor

The Predictor demonstrates how good readers make predictions about a text, by using supporting evidence and monitoring their predictions to see if they hold true or not as they read.

The Predictor shares their predictions with the group and any evidence in the text and/or any background knowledge that helped them make these predictions.

They also share if their predictions were correct. If their predictions were incorrect, they offer up reasons why they may have been wrong and/or ask other students for their thoughts or comments.

Quinn Quokka – The Questioner

The Questioner demonstrates how good readers ask questions as they read to check their comprehension. They try to understand why and how events are happening.

The Questioner shares their questions with the group, which deepens other group members’ thinking about the text. These questions should include both information-based and open-ended critical thinking questions (ex. What decision did the character make? Why did the character make that decision?).

Summer Salamander – The Summarizer

The Summarizer typically begins the group discussions, demonstrating how good readers identify the main ideas of a text and use them to create a coherent summary.

The Summarizer reiterates the main ideas and key details of the passage that was read. The student in this role may ask other group members if any key pieces of information got missed in their summary or if they included something other group members did not think was important enough to include (wasn’t a main idea). Students in this role can be encouraged to use different formats to help them present their summaries, such as simple diagrams or other visual representations.

Clara Kitty – The Clarifier

The Clarifier demonstrates how good readers identify difficult or interesting vocabulary, unusual grammatical structures, challenging concepts, or parts of the text they did not understand well enough that need to be clarified.

The Clarifier also applies strategies to get clarification, such as asking the teacher and other students, using a dictionary, or gathering more clues from the text and discussing it with others in the group to get their input.

Reciprocal Teaching with Kindergarteners?

In all honesty, adapting this method for kindergarteners requires significant modifications. Educators and parents play a crucial role as central facilitators, guiding kindergarteners in their assigned roles and equipping them with suitable tools. However, kindergarten children are fully capable of learning to predict, clarify, summarize, and formulate questions at a level that aligns with their developmental stage. They simply need more examples, practice, gentle encouragement, and appropriate resources to support their efforts. Adapting this method to help your little learner(s) practice these crucial comprehension skills is completely worth the effort… as we will unpack in the next section, so strap yourself in for some great reasons to make these adaptions your own!

Suggestions for How to Adapt this Method for Kindergarteners

Simplify Roles

Make the roles very simple and define the tasks by providing many examples through modeling.

The Questioner: tasked with coming up with one simple question. Example: “Who’s porridge did Goldilocks eat up?”.

Clarifier: tasked with picking out an interesting or unknown word from the text.

Predictor: tasked with providing an answer to the question “What do you think will happen next?”.

Summarizer: tasked with putting the pictures of the story in the right sequence.

Introduce Roles Gradually

You can start with just one role initially and gradually introduce more as your little learner(s) become comfortable.

For example, start by assigning the predictor role to a single student within the group. Make sure all the children understand that only the student holding the predictor card will respond to the question you’ll pose during the story, sharing their thoughts on what they believe will happen next.

You may even offer up two or three choices for your little learner to choose from.

Later, discuss as a group if the predictor was right. Help them generate reasons as to why or why not. This may lead to questions about what they think certain characters are feeling.

Use Visual Aids

Use character cards with simple icons or pictures representing each role. This will help young children understand and remember their responsibilities during discussions.

Visual aids can also be used to help the summarizer, such as sequencing cards to put the main story events in order and then talk about each card.

You might use visual aids with the who, what, where, when, and why questions on different coloured cards to help the questioner create a question by starting their question with the card they picked. Providing sentence scaffolding for generating these questions at this age, can be another great visual aid.

Be the Recorder

As the teacher, record the answers children give for each of their roles or as a way of helping students generate answers and complete their assigned tasks.

One example is to write out or draw a little diagram with labels to record what the predictor says he/she thinks will happen next in the story.

A second example is to record words you know some children may not be familiar with or great adjectives that you want to highlight. After the story is finished, let the clarifier choose one word from the list they’d like to learn. Encourage them to suggest various ways everyone can learn the meanings of unfamiliar words.

NOTE: Before getting children to actively take on any of the roles, be sure to repeatedly model the tasks of each role many times and ensure children understand what each role is and what it means to clarify, question, summarize, and predict. Use simple terms and examples to explain the reciprocal teaching roles. For instance, “Predicting means guessing what might happen in the story. Summarizing is telling the most important parts of the story in your own words.”

Parents reading to their two kids on the couch.couch

Why Teach Reading Comprehension Strategies Early?

The earlier children develop habits that build comprehension when reading, the more impact these skills will have on their language development, critical thinking, problem-solving abilities, and overall reading comprehension abilities as they move through grade levels.

Here are three compelling reasons for introducing specific and tangible responsibilities into storytime to get young learners practicing and building their comprehension abilities using the Reciprocal Teaching Method:

Scaffolding: It provides support and intentional and consistent scaffolding, allowing students to gradually develop the skills, needed for independent comprehension.
Automaticity: Initiating this practice at an early stage lays the foundation for automaticity in comprehension tasks. Imagine this: your little learner encounters an unfamiliar word and their instinct is to investigate its meaning. Similarly, imagine when your little one is faced with a puzzling story event and he/she immediately searches for the clues in the story that unravel the mystery.

Automaticity simply means that tasks have been ingrained through repetition to the point where they become automatic responses or habitual patterns of behavior, effortlessly and naturally executed without the need for deliberate conscious effort.
Reading Motivation: When we make sense of what we are reading, we are better able to construct meaningful connections and applications about what we read, which creates a more interesting and enjoyable reading experience, building intrinsic motivation for reading. And what parent or educator doesn’t love to see a self-motivated reader?

Positive reading experiences lead to higher motivation for reading. Motivated readers understand the benefits of comprehension firsthand, so they are more likely to apply various reading strategies to expand their understanding and overall comprehension. It’s a positive cycle every parent and teacher wants to cultivate for their child or student.

The Reciprocal Teaching Method also provides excellent opportunities to practice turn-taking and listening skills, engage in cooperative collaboration, and expand their communication skills.

Link to post about story extension activities for the fable of The Little Red Hen

Tiny Steps, Big Reads: Everyday Literacy Hacks

Discover the magic in the mundane, with literacy hacks that fit right into your life – because big reads start with the smallest steps.

Start with This Easy Literacy Win!

For one storytime in the day, have your little one choose one of the roles that he/she will be tasked with during the story. Then, choose a role for yourself as well.

Be sure your child understands what their task is. Then at some point in the book where it makes sense, take a pause and get your child to do the task their role is responsible for.

If your child took the summarizer role, you might stop reading at a certain point in the story and ask him/her to tell you about one main event in the story up to that point.

If your child took the clarifier role, you might ask for one or two words that sounded interesting to your child or that he/she doesn’t know the meaning of … maybe re-read a small section to find one together.

If your child took the questioner role, you might work together to create a question from the page you are reading. Typically ‘what’ questions are easiest for little learners.

If your child took the predictor role, ask what he/she thinks will happen next and why.

Ox & Owl Literacy

Key OOliteracy Takeaways

The Reciprocal Learning Method is comprised of four critical reading comprehension domains: predicting, clarifying, summarizing, and generating questions.
This method can be adapted for younger kids to gradually develop their comprehension, build automaticity in applying various comprehension skills, and build internal motivation for reading.
Scaffolding, simplifying, introducing the roles gradually, and using visual aids are excellent ways to help adapt this method for kindergarteners, alongside providing lots of examples, modeling, and encouraging support.
Reciprocal teaching provides a structured way of promoting important comprehension skills and self-monitoring of one’s understanding of a text or story, and starting early can be incredibly rewarding.