A Step by Step Guide To Summarizing That You Can Teach To Your Students
By middle school we expect that kids are able to summarize. However, I’ve found that a lot of them really struggle with this skill. They often say too much, not enough, or even just take words verbatim straight from the source without citing.
Summarizing is actually a really difficult skill. Kids are told repeatedly to take out the main ideas of a passage. But this instruction is not enough. It can be very vague. We need to give more specific directions that will help them differentiate between important and unimportant details.
In this article, we’re going to explore the tasks needed for summarizing. Breaking the process down into specific action steps should help our students summarize better. I’ll also provide a lesson plan template that I hope will help you teach this important skill.
Article Overview:
Defining the Skill of Summarizing
Identifying What Isn’t Summarizing
How to Summarize – a Step by Step Guide
What is summarizing?
Summarizing is the act of creating a summary. A summary gives only the most important points of the information. And a good summary gives all the important points of the information. The information can come from anywhere. In school, we mostly work with written sources of information, sometimes video or audio.
What doesn’t count as summarizing?
There are many ways students can make mistakes in summarizing. The most common error I’ve seen is when they simply list the topic. For example: “This passage was about George Washington.” And they stop there. Sometimes, they say too much and their summaries end up as long as the source, full of unnecessary details.
One of the more serious errors is plagiarizing. I’ve seen this a lot in students. And I remember learning how to do this and being rewarded for it when I went to school as well. Yes, in the primary grades it’s great that we can get the students to locate the main ideas in the story and they’re able to copy it down on paper. However, by the time they reach upper elementary and middle school, we should really be very intentional in teaching students how to summarize ideas into their own words. Sometimes, though, they’ve had years of experience copying from the textbook and it becomes a very hard habit to break. In addition, most plagiarized summaries don’t do a good job of actually summarizing because they are simple parts of the text taken word for word.
How to Summarize – A Step by Step Guide
So how can students summarize properly? Here is a helpful step by step process that we can teach our kids.
Pre-reading the Text
- Preview the text. Before diving into the text, it’s important to preview it so that we can do steps 2-4, which will be extremely helpful in summarizing. Look at the title, author, subtitles, sections, etc. Examine any pictures, maps, vocabulary, and captions. Read the first and/or last sentence of each paragraph, if possible.
- Identify the purpose of the text. Knowing the main goal of the text will help us key into important information. It will help us to know what kinds of information to look for. For example, if the purpose of the text is to describe why an event happened, then we know to look for causes and effects. If the goal of the text is to persuade, then we know we need to look for the claim(s) that’s being made and supporting evidence.
- Predict the text structure. This step goes hand in hand with step 2. They’re pretty much the same, just with a different focus. In this step, we want to specifically identify the text structure. Text structures will give us a general idea of where we can find key information that we anticipated in step 2.
Here is an excellent and thorough resource on text structures. It gives teaching strategies and describes each of the most common non-fiction structures. It’s very comprehensive, with examples, graphic organizers, practice samples, etc.
- Note the types of important details you’ll need based on text structure. Write it down. Have the students write it down. Identify and prepare to use a graphic organizer that would work best for the text structure.
Reading the Text
- Read the text and take notes using the graphic organizer. Confirm/adjust your predictions from steps 2-4 as you go. Write down the important details based on the purpose of the text and text structure. Use a graphic organizer to take your notes as much as possible. Add sections or extra boxes, etc. to it if you need to. Using the graphic organizer will help with correctly identifying key points. It will also prevent plagiarism because the limited space will force students to take out only key words or rephrase.
Put It All Together
- Write the summary by putting the information from your notes and graphic organizer into paragraph form. After steps 1-5, summarizing the text should be easier by this time. Take a bird’s eye view by looking at your notes/graphic organizer. If you are worried about plagiarizing, try not to look at the source text and try putting a limit on the number of sentences students can use to summarize their graphic organizers in paragraph form.
- Check the summary by comparing it to the source text. Make sure the information is accurate and complete, with no plagiarism. It might be useful to have students look at their own summaries and then switch with a partner. Someone else can double check their work with fresh eyes and they can see how someone else completed the same task.
I hope this has been helpful! What are some things you’ve found helpful in teaching summarizing? Share in the comments below!