Reciprocal Teaching? With the Internet?

If you are among my fellow educators that grew up without computers, know you are in good company. But, those kiddos sitting in front of you did. They have never known life without technology! Inevitably, our two worlds have collided and it is up to us to turn those ‘digital natives’ into Internet savvy learners. For those of you feeling a bit out of your comfort zone, here is a guide to help you do just that.

Let’s start with reciprocal teaching first, then build from there.

Focus on the four reciprocal teaching strategies without any technology:

            Predicting

            Questioning

            Clarifying

            & summarizing

Begin with direct instruction, guided demonstrations and think-alouds. Lots of modeling! Scaffold those strategies. Provide support where needed.

Next, what experiences have your students had reading materials online? A quick written survey of your students can provide this information and give you a solid starting point.

Use all that data for making heterogeneous flexible groups of 3-4. Vary the reading abilities. Vary Internet experiences as well. Ultimately, focus on groupings that will foster high levels of student engagement. One side note: don’t be surprised if your low readers with high Internet experience turn key their knowledge to the rest of the group. I just love when my strugglers get a chance to shine!

Go start those groups! Students take turns facilitating group discourse of the 4 strategies. What a great opportunity for students to model for each other! You circulate & monitor ongoing dialogue, offering support as needed.

Next, adding the I to RT

Internet Reciprocal Teaching instruction encompasses multiple, yet specific, reading contexts, each more progressively challenging.

Begin with reading between two web pages, a homepage and a linked webpage. Introduce website structure. More demonstrating, whole group discussion and guided navigation. Unlike reciprocal teaching with paper text, within IRT, reading contexts change as each student navigates their own path throughout the website and links. Ultimately, you want students to learn to follow only the hyperlinks best suited for their purpose of reading. [i.e.-teaching them to work smarter, not harder in the myriad of options lying in wait on the web.]

Next, move to reading and navigating within multiple web pages bound to one specific website (in other words, layers of hypertext). Again, a good deal of demonstrating, whole group discussion and guided navigation. The goal for this context is for students to learn how to read linked information.  This includes guiding them to infer the kinds of information that may be linked to the site. It is also fostering a set of criteria for evaluating what makes a quality website.

Then, time to ‘deprogram’ all the point-and-clickers. You know those kids: the seemingly endless list of search results that appears when searching a topic, for which they click right down the line, in the order they arrive within the search, with little thought behind which to choose except that it is next in the sequence.

Here we want to teach students how work smarter, not harder. Introduce how to best use a search engine, including carefully choose what to include within the search window. Teach students how to read the search results with a critical eye. Finally, teach how to search within a site to locate specific information.

In time, students will make informed choices about what to read on the Internet (bye, bye point-and-click!). Navigating to sites will happen with purpose and to locations containing information best suited for a student’s intended reading.

Time to fly, little birdies!

This is an opportunity for students to use all their previously learned strategies and apply them to a broad reading task.

Online messaging

These lessons delve into the collective of comprehension strategies needed to infer information presented in multiple contexts such as email, blogs, and instant messaging.

     Unlike interacting with traditional texts, each of these situations requires particular inferential reasoning skills as well as

insight into how to construct messages clearly and appropriately within each specific context.

The Big 3

There are three vital facets/components for online reading comprehension

First, inferential reasoning.

Conventional inferential reasoning skills become more intricate and multidimensional within Internet reading contexts. Readers constantly make predictions for each hyperlink available to them. Evolve into increasingly more skilled evaluators of said hyperlinks and their usefulness to the reader’s overall purpose.

Second, strategic knowledge.

The most important avenues of comprehension are knowing what, how, and why. Proficient Internet readers rely on new sources of what, how, and why unique to specific web-based contexts (search engines, blogs, websites, etc.)

Third, critical evaluation

     Because anyone can publish anything on the internet, one of the most importance and greatest challenges is critical evaluation of what is out there.

     Critical evaluation based on utility, validity, accuracy and potential bias (Leu, Leu & Coiro, 2004) helps to navigate those tricky waters.

You can find even more in-depth ideas and examples at

www.newliteracies.uconn.edu/carnegie/documents/IRT.pdf