Reciprocal Teaching

Reciprocal teaching is a reading comprehension method created by Annemarie Palincsar and introduced in 1986, in which teachers and students take turns leading a structured dialogue about a text. It centers on four strategies sometimes called the fab four: questioning, to probe the text; clarifying, to resolve confusing words or passages; summarizing, to state the main ideas in the reader's own words; and predicting, to make educated guesses about what will come next based on what has already been read. Grounded in Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, the method has teachers model the four strategies first and then gradually hand responsibility to students, typically working in small groups, so the scaffolding shrinks as students grow more capable of leading the dialogue themselves.