Summarization in Any Subject

60 Innovative, Tech-Infused Strategies for Deeper Student Learning

Rick Wormeli, Dedra Stafford

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781416626800
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Summarization. Just when we thought we knew everything about it, the doors to divergent thinking open and summarization—no longer something that students must endure until you get to the "cool" stuff—takes on an exciting new role in student success!

In this second edition of Summarization in Any Subject, Dedra Stafford joins Rick Wormeli in adding fresh depth and creative variations to the basics, including changes to all 50 techniques from the first edition and brand new summarizing techniques that can be differentiated for multiple disciplines and levels of student readiness.

Personably written, with a sense of humor and a commitment to students' substantive engagement with curriculum, this new edition provides practical, "show me what it looks like" tools and descriptions as well as QR codes and tech integrations for many of the techniques. The book provides

• A clear rationale for summarization in any subject along with an explanation of the cognitive science that powers its positive effects, including the influence of background knowledge and primacy-recency, plus the benefits of metaphors, chunking, timing, maintaining objectivity, and the efficacy that comes when students process content.
• Practical tips for teaching students note taking, paraphrasing, and text structure.
• Nine easy strategies that teachers can use to help students begin to understand what they need to know in order to summarize.
• Detailed descriptions of 60 strategies and critical thinking variations that provide students with memorable learning experiences, plus targeted support materials that assist in teaching and learning.

It's time to revitalize learning and shatter the tedium associated with summarization, and this new edition of Summarization in Any Subject can help you do just that.

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Chapter 1

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Making the Case for Summarization

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"As you read this book, please stop at regular intervals and summarize what you've read."

For some readers, summarizing is a sensible, even enjoyable task. They know a variety of summarization strategies, and they've experienced the illumination that comes from successful summarization of material. For the rest of us, however, we wonder if all that work is necessary, and hey, the dishes in the sink aren't going to clean themselves. Better get up and do them first.

Our students are often of the latter disposition, willing to do any homework task except summarize. They'll gladly copy a page of the dictionary before summarizing a page of the history book. Summarizing is a fuzzy process for them: "I don't know what's important and what's not." "What if I don't get it all?" "What if I include too much?" "What's the main idea of this paragraph?" "What are the supporting details?" "How do I restate the sentence in a new way when the author already said it as clearly as anyone can?" "Can't we just do a Google doc together?" Lack of clarity and specific methods give any strategy a bad reputation.

Summarizing—restating the essence of text or experience in as few words as possible, or in a new but efficient manner—is filtered by our intended audience and purpose in summarizing. PBS's wonderful Reading Rockets website for young readers (www.readingrockets.org) declares, "Summarizing teaches students how to discern the most important ideas in a text, how to ignore irrelevant information, and how to integrate the central ideas in a meaningful way. Teaching students to summarize improves their memory of what is read."

Many students and teachers, however, assume that summarization must be done in writing. It's immediately seen as an activity requiring pencil and paper or a keyboard. This assumption does not account for summarization's great dexterity, however. It can be done in many formats: orally, dramatically, artistically, visually, physically, musically, in groups, and individually, in addition to the varied written formats. Summarization is one of the most underutilized teaching techniques we have today, and yet it yields some of the greatest leaps in comprehension and long-term retention of information. It's worth restructuring our lessons to provide summarization experiences.

Rationale for Using Summarization

Robert Marzano, Debra Pickering, and Jane Pollock cite extensive research studies in their book, Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement (2004), that prove summarization to be among the top nine most effective teaching strategies in the history of education. Specifically, pages 29–48 (on summarizing and note taking), 72–83 (on nonlinguistic representations), and 111–120 (on cues, questions, and advanced organizers) provide ample evidence for the learning power of summarizing and actively processing information, not just receiving it passively. The book and the accompanying handbook are highly recommended, both to clarify the rationale for summarizing and for tips on how to do it well.

Cognitive theory provides evidence of the power of summarization. One element of cognitive theory that is particularly consistent with summarization is the primacy–recency effect (Sousa, 2003) or, as some writers refer to it, Prime 1 and Prime 2. The effect is simple: we remember best what we first experience in a lesson, and we remember second best what we experience last. Good teachers, then, expose students to most of the big truths of their lessons in the first 10 minutes or so and then review them at the end. This makes sense. When we were in school ourselves and we were taught where to place our evidence in persuasive essays and speeches, we were told to put our strongest evidence at the beginning and the end of the essay or speech. The middle was not as well remembered, and so anything that wasn't a powerful supporting detail should go there.

If we structure our lessons to embrace the primacy–recency effect, it changes what students get from our lessons. For example, if we begin the lesson with management and clerical tasks such as checking homework, getting students access to the server, taking attendance, making announcements, and collecting permission slips, students move the information associated with these tasks to long-term memory. When a student's mother asks, "What did you learn in school today?" later that afternoon, the child is likely to respond this way: "Sheila was absent, I missed six of the math problems, the server was down, and Friday is Funny Hat Day. Mom, does Dad have a funny hat I can wear?"

If a child is in a classroom structured around the primacy–recency effect, in which the teacher exposes students to the big concepts being taught that day in the first 10 minutes, then when the child's mother inquires as to what the child learned, the child responds, "We learned how to figure out the surface area of a cylinder. You just find the area of the top circle, multiple it by two, then find the area of the rectangle that wraps around the middle and add its area to the circle's area." This sounds like a teacher fantasy, but it's true; students are able to articulate the concepts they learned that day. The clerical and management peripherals don't get in the way.

There's a catch, however: the last 7 to 10 minutes of class. We have to provide time for reflection and summarization. Little learning occurs as a result of instruction alone. The kind of true learning that lasts for months and, we hope, years occurs only if we apply concepts outside of the initial learning experience and if we spend time reflecting on and processing what we've learned (i.e., summarizing). This takes conviction, however. We have to be willing to stop our lessons early and summarize, even if we haven't taught that last point of the lesson.

To summon the courage to do this, ask yourself, "Am I teaching so that students will learn, or am I teaching so that I can claim I taught or covered the material?" If we truly care about what students take with them at the end of the school year, then it's easier to choose summarization/reflection activities over coverage. Let's face it: "covering" something means removing it from view. We don't want to be known as teachers who put the Bill of Rights, literary devices, the body's metabolism, chemical equations, and geometry into hiding by "covering" them.

Practical Considerations

In a typical week of teaching, can we summarize every lesson every day? No. Life gets in the way. Fire drills, assemblies, extended class discussions, surprise visits from parents or administrators, computer crashes, and other interruptions occur. Always have summarization as a goal, however. If you get three days during a week in which you were able to demonstrate summarization with your students, it's a good week.

Remember not to limit the use of summarization. In an old television commercial about orange juice, the tag line was "Orange juice—it's not just for breakfast anymore." The same can be said of summarization: it's not just for the end of the lesson. Use summarization structures as your way of assessing students' grasp of the subject before you teach them; then use students' responses to inform and change your instruction. Use summarization strategies in the midst of a unit to help students monitor their own comprehension and provide you with feedback on how their comprehension is developing with regard to what you're teaching. And, of course, use summarization after a learning experience in order to process or make sense of what has been learned and to move the material into long-term memory.

Lectures

Lecturing is an activity in which the effect of frequently using summarization is apparent. Lecturing by itself is a common practice, but only a small amount of the information moves into long-term memory. If we want students to master the concepts, not just hear them, then we'll decrease our reliance on pure lecturing as a way to teach. With lectures delivered in chunks, however, a tremendous amount of information moves to long-term memory. Chunking lectures means that we lecture for 15 to 20 minutes, and then pause and summarize the information just presented. These summarizations can last from 1 to 10 minutes, if necessary. Once they are done, we continue our lecture. These summarizations give the information-saturated brain a chance to sort and clarify for itself, making it feel like it now has room for more, and the new material can be retrieved readily. Leaving the summarization for the end of a 45-minute or longer lecture does not enable the same amount of mastery as does summarization done throughout the class. We summarize en route to mastery.

Problem-Solving Activities

A ropes initiative game or Project Adventure course also demonstrates the power of summarization. Teachers and students who have been over those 12-foot walls, whipped down the zip wires in harnesses, or passed through openings in a roped "spider web" without ringing the attached bell know that the real learning doesn't occur during the events. It comes in the debriefing afterward when the instructor stands with the group and helps them process what the group accomplished: What did you do to help solve the problem? What hindered the group's arriving at a workable solution? How did one student's suggestion aid another student? What would you do differently next time? What does this teach us about working as a group?

Writing Assignments

Writing news articles or observations is another clear application of summarization. Explaining what is observed or experienced in a clear, succinct manner to a particular audience is a helpful skill to master. In almost every one of today's high-tech companies, employees must be able to read or perceive something and then make sense of it by manipulating and regrouping the information and applying it to a new situation, similar to the process that newspaper reporters use to relate the news. Summarization is, thus, a real-world skill.

Conclusion

In the 21st century, students not only have to know facts but also must be skilled information archeologists. They must dig for information, make sense of it, and attach meaning to it. They're charged with getting the main idea as well as the supportive details, the principal arguments, and their evidence. One of the greatest skills we can teach students, then, is how to identify salient information, no matter what subject we teach or how it's presented, as well as how to structure that information for meaning and successful application. It's a learned process of deleting, substituting, and keeping information (Marzano, 2004). The trick is to see summarization beyond its being just a nice idea but too time costly, an ineffective add-on to an already bursting curriculum, or something associated with writing that we don't want to impose on our students or our limited grading energy.

We don't tell students to summarize information purely to retell the information; our students are not parrots in training. Our goal in asking them to summarize information is to use retelling as a strategy that opens a topic for their minds and makes it stick. Retelling purely as a means of memorizing the information is, on the surface, not very helpful; retelling that leads to comprehension and retention is invaluable.

Let's explore how easy and effective summarization is in the chapters ahead.

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Chapter 2

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Summarizing Savvy

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Summarizing is not magical, nor is it an innate skill that some of us have and others do not have. Harry Potter can summarize his potions text without his wand. The big secrets of how to summarize are no secrets at all: students have to be tenacious, they have to practice, they have to learn multiple methods of summarizing, and they must be inclined to revise their thinking as perspective and information warrant.

There are common practices that lead to more effective summarizations. Let's begin our discussion of them by first looking at an original text and its summarization.

Original text:

The Sea Around Us made Rachel Carson famous; the last book she wrote, Silent Spring, brought her enemies (among some powerful interest groups). It took courage to write that book. It was a look at a grim subject—pesticides—and how they were poisoning the Earth and its inhabitants. In Silent Spring, Carson attacked the chemical and food-processing industries and the Department of Agriculture.

They lost no time in fighting back. Rachel Carson was mocked and ridiculed as a "hysterical woman." Her editor wrote, "Her opponents must have realized … that she was questioning not only the indiscriminate use of poisons but the basic irresponsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the natural world."

But the fury and fervor of the attacks only brought her more readers. President Kennedy asked for a special report on pesticides from his Science Advisory Committee. The report confirmed what Carson had written, and it made important recommendations for curtailing and controlling the use of pesticides.

The public, which had been generally unaware of the danger of the poisons sprayed on plants, was now aware. Modestly, Rachel Carson said that one book couldn't change things, but on that she may have been wrong.

—Joy Hakim, A History of US, 2002, p. 91

Summary:

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring angered many people when it was published. The book opened the public's eyes to the devastating use of pesticides on animals and plants, and it attacked companies that used them callously. The companies ridiculed Carson and her work, but the government investigated her claims and found they were true. The government responded to the danger by regulating pesticide use.

How did the summarizer know which portions to bring together to form the final summary? The answer lies in specific practices teachers use to increase their students' summarizing success.

This is not something innate in humans, especially in K–12 students. It has to be specifically taught. Many secondary teachers and college professors, however, assume student capacity that's not in evidence: they think their students know how to summarize, capture the gist, or write an abstract on a topic, research study, or experience, but in truth, students haven't had specific instruction on the process. Some students catch on better than others because they're better at figuring out the rules of classroom survival or expectations of school systems, whereas others have more difficulty understanding summarization and believe it's a waste of time. We can't just compel them with breathy conviction, nor can we show them a good summarization and direct them to do something akin to that example. We have to make the case for its use and give them specific tools to make summarization not only doable but also helpful.

Preparing the Brain for Summarization

Building Personal Background

"One of the great things about being a professor of English," writes Thomas C. Foster (2014), "is that you get to keep meeting old friends." Foster is opening readers' minds to the connections between the text we're reading and our prior experiences, explaining how that experience shapes what we discern as salient:

For beginning readers, though, every story may seem new, and the resulting experience of reading is highly disjointed. Think of reading, on one level, as one of those papers from elementary school where you connect the dots. I could never see the picture in a connect-the-dots drawing until I'd put in virtually every line. Other kids could look at a page full of dots and say, "Oh, that's an elephant," "That's a locomotive." Me, I saw dots. I think it's partly predisposition—some people handle two-dimensional visualization better than others—but largely a matter of practice: the more connect-the-dot drawings you do, the more likely you are to recognize the design early on. Same with literature. Part of pattern recognition is talent, but a whole lot of it is practice: if you read enough and give what you read enough thought, you begin to see patterns, archetypes, recurrences. And as with those pictures among the dots, it's a matter of learning to look. Not just to look but where to look and how to look. Literature, as the great Canadian critic Northrop Frye observed, grows out of other literature; we should not be surprised to find, then, that it also looks like other literature. As you read, it may pay to remember this: there's no such thing as a wholly original work of literature. Once you know that, you can go looking for old friends and asking the attendant question: "Now where have I seen her before?" (Foster, 2014, pp. 23–24)

There's no getting...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Making the Case for Summarization
• Chapter 2. Summarizing Savvy
• Chapter 3. Nine Quick Summarization Strategies
• Chapter 4. Sixty Summarization Strategies
• Conclusion
• Appendix A. Sample Texts for Summarization
• Appendix B. Summarization Practice Activities
• Bibliography
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Authors
• Copyright