Merging CCSS Social Studies/History Standards with Reciprocal Teaching

In my January post, Using Close Reading of Multiple Sources to Get Away from the "Single Story" of US History, I shared a scaffold I learned from Stevi Quate called Reciprocal Teaching. This scaffold assigns roles to students in groups of four: Summarizer, Clarifier, Questioner, and Predictor, as a way to help everyone in the group unpack complex texts. I used it with a packet of primary source materials about The Great Awakening, and noticed that students were getting a lot more out of the texts than previous classes had. 

Along the way, I added some minilessons aligned to the CCSS Literacy in Social Studies/History standards from the Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project as a way to build students' skills for reading informational texts. I connected those reading skill lessons to the Reciprocal Teaching roles: 

• Clarifier (This role goes first after a chunk of text has been read): READING FOR KEY IDEAS AND DETAILS: Standard 1: Reading Closely and Making Logical Inferences: "Readers know that informational texts are conveying ideas, facts and examples. Our first job, then, is to make sure we read informational texts in a way that we can really “get” the information without veering off into personal connections or response. If we’ve done our job well, we should be able to turn around and teach someone else everything we’ve learned so far. We can do this by reading a short chunk of text, pausing, covering or looking away from the text, and trying to say back everything we’ve learned so far." 
• Questioner (This role goes third): READING TO INTEGRATE KNOWLEDGE AND IDEAS AND THINK ACROSS INFORMATIONAL TEXTS: Standard 8: Evaluate Text Evidence, Weighing the Validity of Author's Claims: "Readers of informational texts consider how well an author has made his/her claim by taking a close look at the evidence used to support it. Readers ask ourselves questions like, 'How valid are the author’s claims? Is there enough evidence? Is the evidence good? Does it fit the claim and seem reasonable? Can I trust the source of the evidence? Has the author laid out the evidence in a logical manner that makes sense?”' 
• Summarizer (This role goes last): READING FOR KEY IDEAS AND DETAILS: Standard 2: Determining Central Ideas or Themes: "Once readers really “get” the information in an informational text, their next job is to try to find the central, or big idea of the text. We do this by asking ourselves, “What is this text starting to be about?” We can think about all the details we’ve read about so far, and put them together to find the central idea. We remember to hold ourselves to what the text actually says and suggests, and not veer off into personal connections and response. This way we stay close to the text."   

These minilessons and the practice students had while using the skills during their roles kept their reading (and behavior) focused on the text in front of them.  Students felt much more comfortable digging through the complexity of 18th century writing than they did before.

Fast forward several weeks. We completed a series of "Town Hall Meetings" in which students took on the role of a Patriot, Loyalist, or Neutralist and debated whether the colonists should rebel against Great Britain (see my previous post "Practicing Argument Strategies During Socratic Smackdown". It was time to dig deeper into the issue and come back to primary source texts.

Using another set of Debating the Documents materials, Loyalists and Patriots (MindSparks, 2006), Reciprocal Roles were revived. I wanted to keep the structure from the last round, and also build more informational reading skills. I kept the Clarifier and Summarizer roles the same; students really needed the Clarifier to help them understand the difficult language of the written texts. Summarizing skills were not where they needed to be yet, so I wanted them to have more practice.

However, I changed the Predictor and Questioner roles. I noticed during the first round that the Predictor was floundering around trying to figure out what to do. When confronted with a visual document, what is there to predict? And although I liked the direction the Questioner was going, it seemed like students were ready to dig a little deeper into the idea of bias. I changed these two roles into new ones:

• Schema Connector (Goes after Clarifier): READING TO INTEGRATE KNOWLEDGE AND IDEAS AND THINK ACROSS TEXTS: Standard 7: Integrate and Evaluate Content in Different Media: "Readers of informational texts are always thinking about how new information connects to information from other sources. We do this by comparing what we already know to new information and asking, “Does this fit with what I know? If so, does it add something new or change it slightly? If not, should I change what I thought I knew to this new information? If so, why?”  
• Bias Detector (Goes after Schema Connector): READING FOR CRAFT AND STRUCTURE: Standard 4: Reading to Interpret the Language Used in the Text: "Readers know that even the most factual informational text is written by a person that has a personal perspective. Readers can determine the author’s point of  view and consider how that point of shapes the meaning of the text. We do this analysis by looking back on the language choices in the text. Ask yourself, 'How does the choice of words, the tone of the language, reveal the author’s point of view on the topic?' 'How does the visual style (angle, light, composition, etc.) reveal the author's point of view on the topic?'”  

Here is the new card that students used while discussing the Loyalists and Patriots packet:

These roles worked out well with the second packet. They seemed to fit the information a bit better, and helped students to understand not just what the text was saying, but to think through other important elements such as bias and validity. I liked bringing in the CCSS Social Studies/History standards and finding a way for students to practice the reading skills in a meaningful way. 

If anyone has any other creative ways to teach informational reading and/or strategies for tackling complex texts like primary source documents, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.