Reciprocal Teaching

I'm going to start by saying that, as a middle school teacher, I am not a fan of Reciprocal Teaching (RT). 

However, I have been included in a training for this since January this year. When we first went I gave it a good go and I was really positive. And, granted, there are some really good parts to it. It should train a student to think while they are reading. That is a great thing. 

I do find it limiting, though. For example, when I taught my students to summarize I taught them according to Lori Oczkus' method of limiting it to 20 words. This is what was taught at the professional developments and what is taught in the book: Reciprocal Teaching by Lori Oczkus. This limited my students to how many words they would write for any summaries. Come their state exam time their summaries were only 20 words. They ended up missing some of the major parts of the readings. 20 words is not enough to give a cohesive summary that the state is looking for. 

Despite all of this, there are still some good points to it. Getting the students to think while they are reading a long work is a good idea. It stops students from "zoning out" and forces them to pay attention while they are reading. 

One thing I came up with while driving to work at 5:00 in the morning was a new way of doing Oczkus' "Fab Four." My students are so used to doing the same thing, they needed a new way of seeing something old.

Here's what we came up with:

It's a Reciprocal Wheel. I have the students create two circles: one 10" diameter and one 9" diameter. I then have them fold both circles into quarters and pit them together in the center with a "brad." 

After the circle is assembled, I have the students label the larger circle with the four parts of the RT method: Predict, Summarize, Clarify, and Question. On the smaller circle I have them cut out a piece of one quarter. 

When they turn the smaller wheel they are able to see their predictions, clarifications, questions, summaries. It also limits them in their writing so they cannot be as wordy as normal. It is also extremely visual for my IEP students. They tend to remember what they wrote more because they can associate it with a specific movement. 

RT does require a portion of buy-in. I didn't fully buy-in, but at least I was able to take something from it.