Marie Considine, a Resource Room teacher at Lakeview Elementary School in Mahopac, is thrilled to see an increased level of engagement among the students in her Resource Room. While her students have always been interested in scientific articles involving mysterious natural occurrences and unusual animals from around the globe, they are now excited to share their work and the connections they have made to the text out loud.  They are talking to each other about sections of text that challenge them and analyzing what they think other students their age might struggle with, like multiple meaning words and unclear topics.

What brought this change to her Resource Room?

“The Reciprocal Teaching protocol,” says Marie, “has gotten my students to delve deeply into the text to come up with higher order questions to ask the group.” The process is simple, but explicit instruction in both the strategy and underlying reading comprehension skills are critical for student success. Students learn the skills for four specific roles — Summarizer, Clarifier, Questioner and Predictor — and then rotate through the roles for each section of text. Marie says students develop confidence and “are eager to try a new ‘job’ each time they read.” They have learned to develop their own questions about the text as they are reading.  While Marie had tried reciprocal teaching in the past, the bookmarks and checklists Marie received in the training improved the process significantly. Going forward, Marie plans to build her students’ meta-cognitive skills by having them label the types of higher order questions they develop as they read.