Reciprocal Teaching

Reciprocal Teaching is a research-based strategy based on the work of Annemarie Palincsar, Ann Brown, and Kathryn Ransom who identified the strategies that good readers use most often when they read. Reciprocal Teaching translates the abstract processes of reading and metacognition into concrete strategies that teachers and students can use to improve reading comprehension.

The Project MERIT model of Reciprocal Teaching is composed of a series of five strategies that students and teachers practice as they read any text:

• prediction
• clarification
• visualization
• questioning
• summarizing

Reciprocal Teaching moves the process of reading from whole class instruction modeled by the teacher, through whole class and small group instruction modeled by students to individualized silent reading. In effect, students teach themselves to read by modeling the strategies that good readers use.