Learning in Community

More than a decade ago, Ann Brown and Annemarie S. Palincsar perfected a technique for improving children's reading comprehension. The approach, "Reciprocal Teaching," was simple: Teach children to use the same strategies that expert readers use to get a handle on difficult text.

Students learned to ask for clarification when they came upon words they didn't know, to periodically stop and summarize the passages they had read, to ask questions about the text, and to predict what they would find in the reading ahead.

Reciprocal teaching came to be widely adopted--and sometimes misinterpreted--partly because it fit so well with the traditional reading groups that...