RECIPROCAL TEACHING with Julia Westera
Today we attended a day long workshop about Reciprocal Teaching which was led by Julia Westera at Edgecumbe Primary School. We spent the day listening and learning about what is Reciprocal Teaching. We discussed the evidence based success of this strategy which focuses on reading comprehension using four main strategies ... Predicting, Clarifying, Questioning and Summarising. We learnt about the structure of the approach and how it is currently working in other school. It seems that the benefits to student learning within reading initially and then throughout the curriculum is huge and quite exciting.
We were all given a Teacher Manual which we worked through discussing different aspects of the approach. We watched three videos of a group of students using the approach. We had a go at using the approach within groups of three. Reciprocal Teaching empowers students in a variety of ways. One key aspect is that each child takes on the role of the teacher and leads the group using the RT Tokotoko - 'talking stick'. This tokotoko clearly outlines the structure of the lesson with prompts for the teacher to follow. There were also a variety of management techniques included to enable all students to participate effectively in the learning. These included thumbs up to answer a question or to talk, expectations for participating re-no put downs, no interrupting etc as well as seating arrangements.
My class and one other senior class are going to be the pilot classes for this approach. I will be splitting my class into four reading groups. Each group will have one half hour lesson per day. In order to achieve this Robyn Harawira who is our RTLB will teach two groups and I will teach two groups. We will also have Lynn Wyllie in class at this time to assist with the other children who will be working through the Reading Taskboard while they wait for their time with the Kaiako.
For the next three weeks I will be teaching the four strategies to my whole class using the manual we were given today. Once all tamariki have been taught these strategies we will begin a 5week intensive teaching of Reciprocal Teaching beginning day one of term 2!
This is very exciting stuff and I can't wait to get started. I look forward to seeing the learning gains of all my tamariki especially those who are at risk. I also look forward to this approach transferring into my whole class programme, to developing thinking across the curriculum.
Very exciting stuff!
