This gets students motivated to read other works of poetry and familiarizes them with resources such as rhyming dictionaries and thesauruses. One technique which seems promising is called Reciprocal Teaching. Cadre members Marie Lee, Erin Walters, Jon Felperin, and Natalie Brewer have been experimenting with Reciprocal Teaching in their classrooms and will be sharing their results with the rest of the group in April. This is a strategy we are considering for school-wide adoption next year. A group of students read a text together, chunk by chunk, and then through discussion, help each other understand the content.
Students understand the content by having a focused, structured conversation about the text.
The students are responsible for collaborating together to make meaning. Reciprocal Teaching is a process and a structure into which most comprehension strategies fit. There are a variety of ways to teach the five key strategies of summarizing, predicting, clarifying, questioning and visualizing. As long as discussion is structured around these five key areas, teachers should continue using all the effective strategies they have always used. Placing strategies under the umbrella of the five key areas, will help both students and teachers stay focused.