WEBVTT

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My name is Suzanne Herko.

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I teach Humanities 11 at Gateway High School,

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which is a charter school in San Francisco, California.

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Our humanities program is an integrated study of U.S. literature and history.

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I think reading instruction is appropriate for all ages.

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As we learn and as we develop, we constantly benefit from increased understanding

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of how we learn, and reading instruction is all about learning how you learn.

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It's all about learning how to make sense of new things.

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The more you understand how you make sense of things in reading, the better reader you can be.

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Student: So, Nick, what happened?

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Student: Alright, so he moved, I guess.

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He left the country, met some friends, got a dog...

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Herko: Reciprocal Teaching is a way

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of having students co-construct understanding of difficult text.

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It models the things that good readers do as they read.

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So, they read, they summarize, and they try to make sense and understand their reading.

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They question themselves about what they have read, and they predict what's going to go on next.

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And what Reciprocal Teaching does is it takes those kind of natural instincts

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that good readers do, and it makes them explicit through students having designated roles

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in the Reciprocal Teaching process.

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We have one student read.

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We have one student summarize.

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One student questions.

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One student predicts.

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We rotate through those roles.

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As a group of three or four, students then co-construct their understanding of the text.

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Student: "...

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over again with the summer."

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Student: Basically, what this summarizes is like, he was basically walking along one day,

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some man came up to him, and kind of gave him the...

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Herko: I have chosen Gatsby as part of our curriculum to teaching Reciprocal Teaching

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because even my best readers in the class,

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even though they might be able to understand the basics of it,

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they really benefit from spending additional time

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and the insights of other people as they do it.

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So, I think it's really important that there be a text that's complex enough

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so that there are lots of different entry levels for students.

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Student: You know, how he is giving him directions, he feels lonely.

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Student: What do you predict, Sydney?

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Student: I'm not the predictor; that's her job.

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Student: I predict that something changes.

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His life is going to start to turn around for him.

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Herko: It's our first day of reading the book.

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We had done a lot of pre-reading activities with them,

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kind of schema building activities in terms of ideas and themes.

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So they were kind of prepared conceptually to enter the book,

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but we had not yet read it together.

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And so, what we saw today was their really initial attempt

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to make sense of Fitzgerald and his writing.

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Student: Based on the cover, with like the city at night and it has a lot of lights on it,

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I said that there would be a lot of nightlife.

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Herko: My role as a teacher in Reciprocal Teaching is to build students to independence

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in utilizing these metacognitive processes in their reading.

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We start it by modeling what it looks like.

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We move it to having them practice it on their own with monitoring

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and then practicing it to independence.

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It's called kind of a reading apprenticeship model in the sense that all along I'm there.

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I'm helping them to understand how to do it, cheering them on, giving them positive feedback,

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giving some suggestions on how to do it better,

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and then at some point they can do it on their own.

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We do some direct teaching around each of the roles.

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I think the only role that is particularly difficult for students

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to encounter is the summary role.

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Most of that, I'll kind of front load in the fall by doing lessons around summary,

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and we do that mostly around expository text.

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We talk about finding the main idea and how to kind of glean the main idea from something.

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We use sentence stems, and I've given students some sentence stems

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for what the main idea might be in a particular paragraph.

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And then we just practice it a lot and give them feedback on it.

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It's really all about them practicing again and again.

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It's also about, I think, students understanding how to summarize in a bunch of different texts.

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A text can't be too hard; it can be too easy.

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If it's something that's way too hard for them, they can't even begin to summarize.

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Student: They're talking about Daisy and her husband, and, like, basically,

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how her family is wealthy, her husband's family is wealthy, and how he left Chicago,

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and just basically, just their life story.

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Herko: So, when students first start Reciprocal Teaching,

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I think there are a lot of both kind of cultural and personal roadblocks

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that can inhibit their embracing it.

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I think on the cultural level, it really involves students putting themselves

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out there in the classroom.

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And if students are not such good readers,

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they feel very insecure about participating fully in it.

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And so I think one of the first struggles is creating a comfortable climate in the classroom

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so that students can really take those risks and make mistakes

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and feel okay with it and move on and get better.

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I think on the personal level also, because they're struggling with perhaps insecurity,

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they don't necessarily want to embrace this new thing because it feels

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like maybe it's too forced or it's something that they're not going to be able to do.

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And so I've experienced resistance from students that they don't want to try it out.

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They're kind of scared to put themselves on the line.

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So, I think the biggest struggle is really developing student buy-in into it.

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And I think that one of the ways that you do that is by really being explicit

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about how these are the things that good readers do, and as good readers,

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we can always find text that we find challenging.

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And what we need to do is just be prepared to meet those challenges.

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Student: "I drove over to East Egg to see the two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all."

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Actually, I think we should stop there.

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Student: Alright, they went to play some football.

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Can you actually read it again?

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You read it pretty fast.

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I'm not going to lie.

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Student: That's a great idea.

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Student: "Why they came East, I don't know..."

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Herko: One thing I noticed is that students become much more aware

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of their processes as readers.

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They start saying things like, "Oh, you know, I really need to reread this,

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"which sometimes would seem obvious to a teacher but isn't necessarily obvious to a student.

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Oftentimes students have this idea that when you read something,

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either you get it or you don't get it.

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So, I see them being more metacognitive in understanding what they need

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to do in order to make sense of stuff.

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I see them also gaining more confidence in terms of their ability to approach difficult text,

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so that by the time we get to the spring, students are doing much more independent reading

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of difficult texts, and they're less intimidated by it because they kind of feel like, "Hey,

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I have conquered this text, and I've done that, and I can do this other one as well."

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Student: I think he's going to have an argument with Tom

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because they both love the same kind of-like, they both like Daisy.

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Student: Fight for his love.

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Okay.

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