3 TEACHERS ADAPTATIONS OF RECIPROCAL TEACHING IN COMPARISON TO TRADITIONAL RECIPROCAL TEACHING

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.