M. Marks et al., 3 TEACHERS ADAPTATIONS OF RECIPROCAL TEACHING IN COMPARISON TO TRADITIONAL RECIPROCAL TEACHING, The Elementary school journal, 94(2), 1993, pp. 267-283
3 teachers (grade 1, middle school special education, high school Engl
ish) who had used reciprocal teaching in their classrooms for at least
a school year were observed and interviewed as part of an effort to d
evelop a model of reciprocal teaching that would work well in classroo
ms. All 3 teachers used reciprocal teaching as a framework for class d
iscussion of text read in preparation for students' participation in r
eciprocally taught reading groups. Although the 4 strategies included
in the original reciprocal teaching research (i.e., prediction, questi
oning, clarification, and summarization) were observed in all 3 classr
ooms, and there were a number of other similarities to conventional re
ciprocal teaching (e.g., peer-led reading groups), there also were sub
stantial teacher adaptations of the method. For example, in all 3 clas
srooms, reciprocal teaching occurred as a postreading activity rather
than during first reading, with the student leader role modified to st
imulate greater participation in group dialogue. In addition, reciproc
al teaching occurred over a much longer period (i.e., 7 months to seve
ral years) than that studied in the validating research. In short, the
se teachers used conventional reciprocal teaching as a starting point
for creating instruction they believed to be more powerful than conven
tional reciprocal teaching and more effective in meeting their goals.
This adapted teaching can now be specified in enough detail with respe
ct to its structural characteristics that convincing scientific evalua
tions of it can be conducted.