Riding the Reciprocal Teaching Bus. A Teacher’s Reflections on Nurturing Collaborative Learning in a School Culture Obsessed by Results
This article examines the author’s interactions with the teaching strategy known as Reciprocal Teaching, sometimes also called Reciprocal Reading, which involves students learning to read collaboratively in small groups. Reciprocal Teaching typically involves students teaching
each other by following a rubric of activities that are aimed at primarily improving their comprehension skills. In brief, students read a text in a group and collectively try to understand it, using prescribed procedures. This article scrutinises the original research by Palincsar and Brown
which created the strategy and questions some of its claims. While many other investigations into Reciprocal Teaching have aimed to prove or disprove its efficacy, this enquiry studies the discourses which inform the strategy, arguing that there are problems with its presentation in the original
article which have affected subsequent representations of Reciprocal Teaching. The article shows how the author, an English teacher in a large secondary school, taught Reciprocal Teaching to teenagers for a year and argues that the presentation of Reciprocal Teaching he read in a well-regarded
teaching handbook caused him to deploy Reciprocal Teaching problematically. It was only when he taught Reciprocal Teaching in a more imaginative fashion that he found greater success.
Keywords: Collaborative learning; Palincsar and Brown; Reciprocal Reading; Reciprocal Teaching; autonomous literacy strategy; improving exam results; secondary English teaching; teaching reading
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: Department of Educational Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK
Publication date: 03 April 2018
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