Dr. Rebecca Palacios is an educator who taught preschool for more than thirty years in Corpus Christi, Texas. Palacios is also a teacher mentor and the former vice chair of the National Board For Professional Teaching Standards.
Dr. Rebecca Silverman is an Associate Professor of Early Literacy in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. She specializes in language and literacy development and instruction, with a focus on children with learning differences, vocabulary and comprehension development, and children from low-income and English-learning backgrounds.
Reciprocal teaching is a cooperative learning strategy that aims to improve students’ reading comprehension skills, with four components: predicting, clarifying, questioning, and summarizing. A group of students take turns acting as the teacher in guiding the comprehension of a text.
Originally designed with seventh grade students, Reciprocal Teaching is a research-based strategy that teaches students to work in small groups to coordinate the use of four comprehension strategies: prediction, clarification, summarization, and student-generated questions. This article illustrates how to implement Reciprocal Teaching for the Primary Grades (RTPG). Modifications include: additional strategies, cue cards with pictures and scripts, group work interspersed with whole class follow-up, and an independent written component for individual student accountability.
Students with ASD can have strengths or challenges in either word recognition and language comprehension that will impact reading comprehension. It is important to assess, monitor, and track the word recognition or decoding skills and language comprehension skills as you evaluate reading comprehension.
