Literacy Professional Learning Resource – Teaching Strategies

Guided Reading - Reciprocal Teaching

(Teacher interview – Guided Reading Reciprocal Teaching – Bacchus Marsh PS)

Video transcript

Part 1 - Using a Task board for Yrs 5 & 6

The way that I run and organize a Reciprocal session in the classroom is that we use a task board which is a vital and key ingredient to having kids work in groups. The task board is set up so there are four rotations and the students are broken into four groups and they rotate around two of those rotations in the morning, in the Literacy Block and those sessions might last for 35 – 40 minutes depending on the needs of the students and what they’re doing and what their focus is as well. The other thing is it’s got to be needs based so it’s not just Guided Reading Reciprocal Teaching for the sake of doing it, there needs to be a really explicit, certain reason for doing that.

Part 2 - Meeting special needs

So, for example it might be that you’ve noticed a need in a certain group of kids, whether it be grammar, content, questioning that you want to focus on. So those kids will be pulled out as part of the group and the other important thing is that the groups always change too because their needs aren’t always the same.

Part 3A - Predicting

‘Okay guys, we’re going to be looking at the Terracotta Warriors. Before we start though I want you to think about what you already know about them.

So we’ve watched a video and we’ve talked about them, so I’m going to give you one of these forms each –

‘What I already know about the Terracotta Warriors before reading’. So we before we even look at this information, I want to know what you already know about okay?’

PT 3b

‘We’re going to predict what this piece of text is going to be about, so it's called ‘Discovering the Terracotta Warriors’. Okay, use the title and what we already know – who can predict what we might read about?’

‘Yep – the way he lived his life?’

‘It could be about his enemies and other people who hated him the most ’

Okay, yep. Rebecca? ’

‘ People who tried to kill him and that he might have been somewhere else?

‘ Okay , because we know that the Terracotta Warriors protected him and his tomb so we know that he ’ s died so we ’ re going to find out about what you think? Okay

Part 4A - Clarifying

‘Were there any words in there that you weren’t sure of, or any sentences that you just weren’t sure why they were there or what they meant. Hayley? ’

‘ Umm, Musician … something?

‘Musician okay. Does anyone know what a Musician is?

‘It’s a person who plays an instrument.’

 ‘Mmmm, makes sense. Okay. Anyone else got a word that they would like to clarify?’ Nathan?

‘The Zihan? thing’

‘The ‘Xi’an’ I think. Okay, how would we find out what that is?

Part 4B

Let’s read the little bit just before it. It says – ‘by taking the Emperor back to Xi’an in his carriage’ - what do you think that might be? Bonnie?

‘Umm, a place’

‘A place, yeah. Okay, so even though we’re not quite sure how to say it, the words around it tell us it’s is a place. Okay, great. Any other words that you wanted to clarify?

‘Elixir?’

‘Elixir. Okay, now notice that it is in bold. There’s place in this book that we can go to, to find out what that is. What is it?

'The glossary’

Yeah. The glossary. Okay, so it’s at the start of this chapter so just flick back a couple of pages and look up ‘elixir’.

Can you read it out Bonnie?

‘A medicine believed to prolong life’

So it was a medicine they took in the hope that they would live longer. Does that make sense? Why do you think he was taking the elixir?

Part 5 - Generating questions

Okay, w’re going to move into question generating. Now remember we’ve got three levels of questions. So the first level’s the literal, right there on the page. You can find the answer to the question by looking back at the text. Then we’ve got our inferential. Now this is where you use what you know already, and you guys know quite a bit, plus you can use what’s written down and make the connections between it, but it doesn’t tell you exactly what the answer is and then the third level, the evaluative level, where you have to basically think on your own. So you have to use all the things that you know and make a judgement.

Okay? And you’re all very good about having an opinion and backing it up okay? So that’s that level and that’s where we get to debate with each other. Okay?

Part 6 - Literal Questions

Katelyn?

How did cover up his death?

Okay, how do they cover up his death? Does anyone have a response to that one?

They put a load of fish in him, and it got rid of the decaying Emperor’s smell.

Okay, it covered up the smell didn’t it? Okay, great, so that was a ‘Literal’ level question …

Part 7 - Inferential questions

Okay Guys, the questions starts ‘Why does … ?’ have a look at the text, think of a question that begins ‘Why does…?’

‘Well I’ve got ‘Why does Shi Huangdi move around his palace?

‘Okay, Why does Shi Huangdi move around the palace? Whose got an answer to that? Can you give us an answer?

Well he moved around because he was too afraid of being killed by people .

Hmmm, so that was an inferential question, so we had to go back to the text and we had to read between the lines. We had to think about what we already know about Ancient China and we had to use what was here in the text as well, but it didn’t tell us exactly the answer did it? We had to think on our own. Okay, great answer.

Part 8 - Evaluative questions

So let’s have a go at some evaluative questions. My question for you is … we’ve already talked about how they covered up the Emperors death by using the fish and making it smell, we’ve talked about why they did that, what I want to know now is, why was it so important that the people didn’t know that Shi Huangdi had died?

Because people might start wars and that would be bad.

Okay, so fighting over the land? Okay …

Part 9 - Summarising

Let’s move on to summarising, would anyone like to summarise what we’ve just read?

Well, basically what we just read was how he died and how they covered up his death and in 1974 how they found something amazing which was his tomb.

Part 10A - Change of Leadership

Let’s move on, Rebecca, would you like to take over as the Leader?

Hmmm.

Great

Who wants to predict what’ s going to happen in ‘Unearthing the Terracotta Warriors’? The discovery of the Terracottas, like when they were found and who discovered them and why they were so important.

Hmmm. Clarifying, does anyone have any words they don’t know?

Chariots?

Well chariots, we don’t have them today for our transport, they were used in the olden days, and they had horses at the front to move the carriage and people inside of it, to get around town … .

Part 10B

Who’s got a literal question that you can find in the text?

How many rows were buried? More than seven thousand … .

Does anyone have an inferential question that they’d like?

 Yep, ummm, why did they bury the soldiers like that?

Alright, who has an evaluative question that they’d like to ask?

Why is the discovery so exciting?

It was exciting because they found out the battle formation and they still want to find out more …

Alright. Who’d like to summarise what we just read?

Ummm I will. It’s about the Terracotta Warriors they found in the pits and they found animals and charioteers and all that and weapons. And they got to study their battle formations.

Great, thanks Rebecca. Well done Guys.

Part 11 - Text Summary or Focused Writing

What I want you to do now is get out your ‘Before and after’ charts again. We’ve already talked about what we knew before reading. Now we know a little bit more and I want you to make some more dot points in the after reading space. Okay? Once you’ve finished that, then there’s a bit down the bottom that says ‘And now I want to know’ . So we haven’t got all the answers from this information about the Terracotta soldiers, so what I want you to ask is ‘What else do you want to know or need to know about them?’ Okay?

Part 12 Teacher interview – Guided Reading Reciprocal Teaching Yr 7

 I choose ‘Guided Reading Reciprocal Teaching’ when I’ve got a double. It’s really important that we have the kids working in groups so that I can concentrate on one group and I’ve only got enough time to do that when I’ve got a double. I also choose it when the text is going to be difficult and I when I really want the kids to get key ideas from the text.

The students who have difficulty with Comprehension, gain from listening to other people’s opinions and ideas. The students who are quite able are allowed to have an opinion and they back it up and of course that enables them to do even better andtounderstand even more.

So there’s not one child that doesn’t gain from this sort of teaching approach.

Part 13 - Organizing the Yr 7 class

When I’m organizing the class, I explain all the activities to the students. I ask them to ask questions if they’re not clear on what they need to do. The tasks are always set up so that the students will be able to do them on their own or with help from the rest of the group and then they are set to work. I make sure they are settled and then I start work with the Reciprocal Teaching group.

The benefits of this teaching approach is that it allows the students a deeper understanding of what they are reading. Very often we’re content driven and it means that the kids are rushing through a lot of material and perhaps not understanding it very well. This gives them more time and they are able to develop a deeper understanding. And it also allows them to discuss and debate with each other which I think is very valuable.

A lot of the time teachers ask the questions and the students respond which means that they’re not doing much of the talking and thinking on their own. So this provides them with that opportunity and they gain so much more from it.

Part 14A - Advice for teachers starting out with Yr 7

For teachers who are trying this for the first time, my advice is to take it slowly, don’t rush it. Set it up so that you introduce the roles that you work through with the whole class. And then the rest of the students need to be occupied for you to be working with one group. So I set up my groups and wasn’t doing Reciprocal Teaching for quite some time, just ensuring that the groups knew how to work together.

When I’m setting up Reciprocal Teaching with my group we begin with predicting. We always think about what we already know and often we’ll do a little exercise to bring that out and then we’ll discuss it. We then look at the title, the pictures and use what we know to predict what the text might be about.

I then ask them to read a small part and after they’ve done that we check our predictions and then we move into clarifying.

As we’ve been reading through I ask the children to use sticky notes to mark any words they’re not sure of and we’ll go back and clarify that they are aware of what those words mean. And we often use the group because there’s a lot of knowledge in our group and they can often find out for themselves. There’s also glossaries in the books that we’re using and we use dictionaries as well to clarify anything that they’re not sure of.

So then we move into the question generating. Now this is, the kids love this part because they get to debate with each other and we usually go through the three levels of comprehension questions. So we start with the literal, then move to the inferential and then the evaluative. After we’ve done this we move into the summarising and this is a really important skill for the kids to build up so I always ask for them to summarise what we’ve read and they do that really well.