Reciprocal Teaching, Reaction Paper Example

Summary of Key Points

The concept of reciprocal teaching works on the basis that cognitive development is highly influenced by knowledge experts being able to assist learners in the development of their own internal strategy for learning. It is the concept of incremental transfer of learning responsibility from the teacher to the student and as such making the student more self-reliant in taking responsibility for their learning. The main emphasis is based upon language teaching and improvement of comprehension skills.

Listening skills are particularly important in early child development and particularly beginner language students. They help the child in the development and acquisition of language skills. The art of listening is an important party of the continuous ongoing learning experience. They help the child to hear and interpret information correctly and as such an important part of vocabulary and comprehension development. Young children develop these skills by interaction with other children and listening to the teacher. It is the beginning process of creating dialogue and the question and answer process. The use of repetition helps in the development of conversational skills. With adult learners the concept of effective listening is an important part of the development of communication skills and assists in the development of Grammar, Vocabulary and Pronunciation skills.

Benefit of Information

The concept of scaffolding of information helps to develop a modular and structured approach towards the incremental transfer of learning responsibility.

Piaget considered how children’s minds work and as such became extremely influential in childhood education. As children are growing up, they are limited in learning capacity until they are sufficiently psychologically mature enough to accept different tasks. This maturity model was illustrated in stages and provided a vital input to educational approaches in teaching children. With scaffolding, the teacher only offers support where the skills are considered beyond the capability of the student. There are a number of different approaches to this but it might include something like:

• Building modular learning components
• Providing guided practice towards task accomplishment
• Mnemonic device chant
• Tutoring other students

Alternative Approach

The alternative is to provide the student with a straight-forward curriculum of learning whereby the teaching becomes a static transfer of knowledge. The teacher retains the responsibility for the teaching and learning process with no transfer of ownership or responsibility for learning to the student. An example of this is the standard ‘lecture theatre’ approach to the students where the teacher simply imparts knowledge to the masses.