Summarizing

What Is Summarizing?
Summarizing is how we take larger selections of text and reduce them to their bare essentials: the gist, the key ideas, the main points that are worth noting and remembering.Webster's calls a summary the "general idea in brief form"; it's the distillation, condensation, or reduction of a larger work into its primary notions.
What Are We Doing When We Summarize?
We stripaway the extra verbiage and extraneous examples. We focus on the heart of the matter. We try to find the key words and phrases that, when uttered later, still manage to capture the gist of whatwe've read. We are trying to capture the main ideas and the crucial details necessary for supporting them.
When You Ask Your Students to Summarize, What Usually Happens?
* they write down everything* they write down next to nothing
* they give me complete sentences
* they write way too much
* they don't write enough
* they copy word for word
What Did You Want Them To Do?* pull out main ideas
* focus on key details
* use key words and phrases
* break down the larger ideas
* write only enough to convey the gist
* take succinct but complete notesHow Can I Teach My Students to Summarize?
Please be warned: teaching summarizing is no small undertaking. It's one of the hardest strategies for students to grasp, and one of the hardeststrategies for you to teach. You have to repeatedly model it and give your students ample time and opportunities to practice it. But it is such a valuable strategy and competency. Can you imagine yourstudents succeeding in school without being able to break down content into manageable small succinct pieces? We ask students to summarize all the time, but we're terrible about teaching them good ways todo this!
Here are a few ideas; try one...try them all. But keep plugging away at summarizing. This strategy is truly about equipping your students to be lifelong learners.
* After students have...