Nothing is more frustrating than asking a student to summarize an article or story, only to have the student go on and on and on with frivolous details of the story, or write a one page “summary” of a two page story. Face it, being able to summarize is a difficult skill for many students.
I especially loved when Harvey & Goudvais (2007) stated that, although the “summarizing and synthesizing” chapter in the book is last, does not mean that it these should be isolated skills taught at the end of the year, but rather are skills taught intermittently as we teach students how to determine the facts of the reading selection, order important events, pick out the most important points from a text, etc.
It really amazes me at times just how difficult it is for students to accurately summarize. I have found that helping students pick out the most important details of a story or text and then being able to put these details in an order to explain what the story is mostly about, is a helpful skill in teaching students to summarize. I have practiced this skill with students and it always blows my mind just how difficult it is for some students to pick out “important details”. A lot of times, I get students writing the first or last sentence of the text.
I especially like the strategy “Writing a Short Summary” in which the teacher has the students create a two column sheet of paper with titles What the Piece is About/What It Makes Me Think About. After reading a text selection out loud to the students, the teacher had the students record what the selection made them think about, emphasizing that nothing is more important than the reader’s thinking. After sharing their thoughts, the teacher turns their attention to summarizing the text by orally retelling. The teacher asks them to consider: (1) the most important ideas (2) keeping it brief (3) saying it in one’s own words in a way that makes sense. The teacher then asks the students to tell the most important ideas of the text, as the teacher records them. What happens next, I believe, is a valuable teaching moment as the teacher sifts through the ideas and helps the students determine which ideas were important enough to include in the summary, which ideas could be combined into one idea, and which ideas didn’t really need to be included in the summary.
Once again, I love how the idea of focusing on the importance of the reader’s thinking is emphasized throughout this chapter.
Resource:
Harvey, S. & Goudvis, A. (2007). Strategies that work. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.
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