Carolyn L. Streets
Reciprocal teaching is an instructional research-based practice that is proven to improve reading comprehension through explicit teaching of metacognitive skills.13 Metacognition is the process used to plan, monitor, and access one’s thinking. This includes students developing a critical awareness of their own thinking and learning.14 As students will use a high level of analysis to critically interpret and synthesize information, the reciprocal teaching method will support key reading comprehension elements: predicting, clarifying, questioning, and summarizing. Through the reciprocal teaching process, researchers note, “It is an amalgamation of reading strategies that are believed to be used by effective readers and follows a dialectic process to enable metacognitive thinking and to empower students to take ownership of their learning in a systematic and purposeful process.”15
