Planning a Reciprocal Learning Lesson
Putting Reciprocal Learning to work in your classroom means thinking
through four planning steps:
1. Select or design the exercises or activities. Because most Reciprocal
Learning lessons are used to review content and practice skills, the
best items tend to have clear right and wrong answers. For this reason,
Reciprocal Learning is ideally suited to applying spelling and grammar
rules in English or any world language, solving analogies and math problems,
reviewing critical vocabulary terms in a unit, and reviewing key historic
and scientific concepts and facts. Reciprocal Learning can also be
used to improve reading comprehension and develop problem-solving
skills. For more on these “higher-order” applications of Reciprocal
Learning, see the Variations and Extensions section on page 169.
2. Develop answers and hints. The hints you provide coaches are
entirely up to you. You can provide memory refreshers (Do you
remember when we dissected the frog? Can you visualize what its heart
looked like? Can you describe that?), content-oriented hints (This president
also served as a general for the Union during the Civil War), or the
steps in an algorithm or process (Remember: Order of Operations
follow the steps in the acronym “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally”).
Encourage coaches to be creative and develop clues of their own as
well.
3. Design the worksheets students will receive. Whether you choose
to put each student’s questions and answers on one sheet or multiple
sheets, remember this simple rule: Player A gets a set of questions/activities
and the hints and answers to Player B’s questions and activities.
Players B gets a set of questions/activities and the hints and answers to
Player A’s questions and activities.
Try to include a “cooperative challenge” question at the bottom of
each worksheet. The two students can work on the cooperative challenge
together (no more coach, no more player—partners on equal
footing) while they wait for other pairs to finish the initial exercises.
Cooperative challenges tend to require more effort and more analytical
thinking than the regular activities on the worksheets. Cooperative challenges
can be short-answer questions, challenging problems, or minisynthesis
tasks. For example, after using Reciprocal Learning to review
the imperfect and subjunctive tenses, a Spanish teacher posed this
cooperative challenge to student pairs:
∘ How does the past tense differ from the imperfect and subjunctive
tenses?
∘ Now, translate your answer into Spanish.
4. Decide how you will assign partners and arrange the classroom.
You should probably establish partnerships randomly to eliminate the
chances that a student will feel left out because no one picked him or her
as a partner. Plan to have students change partners frequently as you
continue to use the strategy. Changing partners establishes an important
message about your expectations for cooperation: In your classroom,
everyone works together.
As teachers, we sometimes assume that students know each other
just because they are members of the same class, but this is not usually
the case. Plan to help partners get to know each other. You might want to
design a simple warm-up question (Whom do you most admire? What
foreign country would you most like to visit?) to allow the partners to
interact before starting the lesson.
Some other considerations include time (How long will students
work in partnerships?) and the seating plan for the lesson. Because students
feel more like members of a team when they sit side-by-side, the
ideal seating arrangement has players sitting next to their coaches. In
this position, the coach is able to observe the player’s work clearly.
When students sit opposite each other, the atmosphere seems more
adverse, and the player may feel that the coach is correcting and judging
rather than helping.