Summarizing

Summarizing is how we take large selections of text and reduce it to “the gist”, or key points or main point or by putting it into your own words. I think it is so important to teach the skills of removal of extraneous details, underlining selective important parts, and identifying only the “who, what, where, why and how” details. This skill is so important to the success of our students and sometimes it is lacking at the High School level. As special education teachers, we sometimes have to place special IEP goals and benchmarks in their IEPs to encourage the learning of this skill.

One idea that I found important was the fact that summarizing is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught. At the high school level, I think we assume students know how to summarize and when they don’t do it, we label them as lazy. Summarizing really does involve higher-order thinking skills that are also sometimes not fully developed.

In the upcoming month, I hope to teach my students to: 1) delete unimportant information, 2) delete information that was already given 3) reduce words and 4) underline/highlight the topic sentence (if it is a photocopy). I think I am going to make up a poster of these steps and place it in my room for the visual learner as well as a daily reminder. Another idea that I enjoyed learning about was the Reciprocal teaching. This teaching strategy involves four higher-order thinking skills: summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. This sometimes happens naturally in my Instructional Support class where a student will come in with a variety of work from a variety of teachers, from a variety of different grade levels and expect me to know what they have to work on and know the material. For example, I teach freshman through seniors and the High School offers many different history classes at each grade level as well as “half-year exploratory” history classes. A student will walk in and say that they need help with their history assignment. In my mind, that history assignment could be on anything. The first thing I do is get them to summarize what they think they should be learning about, and then, naturally, questions come up because I don’t often have the background information that they have. Usually, this works out well. They feel smarter because they know something that I don’t know. I am happy because they just verbalize what they didn’t think they already knew. I don’t leave it at that level. I always need for them to clarify some important fact or piece of information for me. We usually predict or “think aloud” possible solutions to their academic assignment. This all happens within a very short period of time (less than an hour) and usually we both learn something.