Reciprocal Thinking
Reciprocal thinking is a four step strategy that engages students in summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. It allows students to recall prior knowledge and apply it towards deeper thinking. It's designed to encourage an open dialogue between students facilitated by the teacher. In this learning strategy, students take on the role of facilitator of the learning to create their own questions about a topic or lesson.
Effect Size: .79
Digital Tools to Support Reciprocal Thinking
Canvas Discussion
In your Canvas course, click on Discussions. Then click the "Add Discussion" button to create your discussion.
Tips for facilitating reciprocal thinking in a Canvas discussion
Put students into groups of four and assign roles of summarizer, questioner, clarifier, and predictor.
Once students read the content or explore the learning, have them prepare for their role. Consider concept mapping to organize thoughts.
Then, instruct the summarizer in each group to post the original thread for their group, highlighting the key ideas.
The questioner will then respond to the thread and pose questions (unclear parts, puzzling information, connections to concepts already explored.
The clarifier in each group will address confusing parts and attempt to answer questions that are posted in their thread.
The predictor can offer predictions about what the group will learn next or what the author will unveil next.
The roles then switch and the next part of the lesson or text is explored. Students can stay in their original groups or the teacher can switch the groups up.
Jamboard
Google Jamboard, accessible through Google Drive, allows students to share the document and work collaboratively with others.
Template: You will want to click on the More Actions icon (three dots to the left of the blue Share button) and click Make a copy.
Nearpod
When in a 'Live Participation' mode for presenting with Nearpod, teachers can facilitate a reciprocal thinking activity in real-time. Teachers can have whole group discussions and have students dive deeper into their thinking.
Once the presentation had ended, teachers are able to see a report of all student work from the session.
Google
With the Google comments feature, students can carry out their role by highlighting exactly what text they'd like to comment on and even assign it to the next person in their group to give feedback on.
Highlight the section you want to leave feedback on.
Select the comment icon to leave a comment.
Use the @ symbol to specially assign the feedback to a student.
Leave a voice comment using the Mote extension in Google.
