Assignment #3: Complete the 4 part assignment format as you read, reflect, and respond to Chapter 3 – Summarizing and Notetaking
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A. Self Assessment of Current Beliefs and Practices: This component asks you to reflect on how and why you currently use the instructional strategies of summarizing and notetaking in your classroom. The intent of this is to activate your prior knowledge of your strategy use so that you can make comparisons as you read the chapter. Below are the questions to help you complete your self-assessment. (Complete – but do not post!)
• In what situations is it important for my students to summarize?
• What does summarizing help my students do?
• What do I do to help students understand and use the process of summarizing?
• What questions do I have about using summarizing in my classroom?
B. Read & Reflect “Research & Theory”: This portion of the assignment asks you to read chapter 3 and reflect briefly on your thinking after reading the “Research and Theory” section for summarizing and notetaking. (Complete – but do not post!)
C. Practice: Choose one of the specific “classroom practice” strategies or techniques shared in this chapter to teach to your students (If you are not currently teaching, you may share how you would use this strategy in your classroom) – please post a brief reflection of how this went to the posting labeled Week Three: Summarizing and Notetaking. Click on the “comment” link below.
D. Final Strategy Reflection: Use the following sequence of questions/promps to reflect on what you’ve learned about both the strategies presented in the chapter and what you’ve learned about yourself as both a teacher and a learner. Please post your brief reflection to the posting labeled Week Three: Summarizing and Notetaking by clicking on the “comment” link below.
How has the information you read in this chapter on summarizing affected your thinking about teaching and learning? What have you learned about yourself as a teacher and learner? Use the following questions to assist you in writing a brief strategy reflection:
• How has reading this information affirmed some of what you already knew about summarizing?
• What is something you now understand better about summarizing?
• How might you change how you use summarizing in your classroom?
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8 comments:
C. Summary writing: with my higher reading groups, I have been practicing writing summaries with them. First we wrote summaries of short stories, then I have been writing a summary with them after each chapter of a book. However, I have not provided a detailed framework to them like this chapter suggested. I did try this with one of my reading groups. It was harder than I thought it would be for them. They needed a lot of guided instruction to answer the questions. Once we answered the questions, I had to lead them to make a summary. Also, after using the framework suggested, it made a longer summary than I have been trying to get my kids to write. In second grade, we go from having them orally retell a whole story, to writing a summary about it. It is a big transition for them, and it is hard to teach them how to cut out information, after we have been telling them for two years to tell us all the details of what happened.
D. Before reading this chapter, I thought of summaries and note-taking as study skills, and also skills for high level grades. I have never spent a lot of time practicing these skills. We do talk about summaries in second grade, but it is a lot of whole group activities, and often orally. It is hard to get kids to write a summary when they can only write a few sentence long story. But, my higher kids could do this. As I mentioned above, I have tried with them, but never had an exact format to follow.
Also, I would like to try some notetaking with my kids. They do this, again, whole group and orally. But it would be good to try while watching a movie. I usually tell them to look for something specific in a movie we are watching, so that could easily be translated to writing. It is a good skill to learn, and hopefully would help them remember the information better.
Hi Katy…you are right. It is an extremely hard transition for 2nd graders to transition from retelling to summary. Like you said, we’ve trained them to tell us as much information as possible for what they’ve read. Do you guys use the DRA2 as a district reading assessment? I think that the way you’ve been doing it, with shared reading and writing..more whole group guided lessons…is the best way for you to do this for most of the year. It is expected as mastery in 3rd grade in our state, what about yours?
Chapter 3 - Kristi Richards
C. I am currently meeting with the second grade team during their PLC cycle. They have written their goal around a weakness they have noted in their students’ DRAs. The students haven’t been able to determine an important event and express why it’s important. As they focus on this goal, they have asked me to focus on instructing several of my groups in the area of summarizing the story. For those of you who use the DRA, you know that there is a jump from level 24 to level 28. In the early levels, the students retell the story orally. For this skill, we work on elements of literature, sequencing, and strategies that help us retain information. Yet, in the higher levels, the students have to write a summary of the story. This is quite a shift for the students. When I think about the main areas of instruction, I’m going to focus on pulling out important events, telling them in your own words, and writing down your thinking.
I have just started the summarizing instruction. I’ve decided to start by modeling and practicing sharing a personal story out loud with a partner and then having the partner verbally summarize what happened. I have noticed that students, when they are first staring to summarize, struggle putting the summary in their own words. This experience will, hopefully, force them to use their own language. I realize these may sound more like retells at first. Then, I think I’ll move to reading a fictional story out loud and using the frame questions as we go to have a guided experience summarizing the story. I’m going to see how that goes before making further plans.
2. I find summarizing to be a very difficult still to teach, especially with struggling readers. There are so many other skills, such as determining importance and the author’s intent that play a role in the summary. Those supportive skills/strategies can be a bit abstract for your struggling reader. I found this chapter to be quite helpful. I love the idea of using frame questions to facilitate a summary. It allows the student to practice summarizing successfully with boundaries that support the process. It allows you to focus on the summary piece, instead of having to take numerous side trips to teach other skills/strategies. It scaffolds the experience in a way that allows the student to hear and practice effective summaries. I am going to try using the narrative frame and the TRI frame to practice summarizing narrative and informational texts. I will need to think further on how to transition this practice to the writing piece on the DRA.
Posting for Kellie:
Kellie said...
C.Practice
My students are ending the year with book clubs. I'm definitely going to use the Narrative Frame to help them learn to summarize. I think I'll try one in a shared writing format and then decide if I think they are ready to tackle one on their own or with a partner. Many of my students are English Language Learners or students who struggle. I'm really hoping this frame will help them understand summarizing better. Determining importance is so hard for many of them and this will provide a structure to guide them. I used to use reciprocal teaching and have gotten away from it. After reading this chapter I think I'll try and get back to it again. If possible I'll try using it with the book clubs, but if not this year then next year.
D. Reflection
I'll admit that I don't put as much time into summarizing as I should. I think sometimes it feels just so daunting. This chapter really helped me to see how to teach summarizing in a way that provides support and structure to a complicated skill. It was enlightening to learn that there are so many strategies to pull from. Although I try to have students take notes I've always taught them to be brief. It made sense to read that more notes are better so I will be changing that. I also think that I'll start instruction on note taking much sooner in the year and definitely set aside time so that my students can read over their notes. I realized that I'm always telling them that we grow theories and ideas from the notes, but I rarely allow them time to look back at the notes for patterns.
Thanks for your comments Kristi & Kellie. Kristi - I the district that I worked in a couple of years ago, did use the DRA…and you are right, 24 to 28 is the big jump…and it is the grade level goal for 2nd grade. We spend all of Kindergarten and 1st grade training them to retell, and then they are asked to summarize. I think having students practice oral summaries is a great idea! Kellie – especially your ELL students will benefit from using the structures of the frames….and I think that reciprocal teaching would also be another instructional strategy that would support your children in being able to accurately summarize.
As you are working with your struggling students, they s struggle with finding t he most critical elements of the story. To support story summary, we ask children (as they are reading a chapter book or portion of picture book) these questions:
• What is this selection about?
• What are the main ideas of this selection? What is your evidence?
• What is not important to remember in this selection? Why?
Sarah Barnett.
C. We used The Topic-Restriction-Illustration Frame in our plants and seeds unit in my first grade class. The students had a learning log, and each page of the learning log had an "essential question" with room for a scientific picture and a written response. Before responding to each question, we read books, learned songs/poems, and made charts with labels and pictures. All this was done GLAD style. Then, in order to answer each question, we used this topic-restriction frame to narrow down all the information to answer each question in general terms. I asked questions to guide my students in the right direction, then we composed our response together on the document camera before each student wrote in his/her own learning log.
I have also used summarizing as part of our reading program. During the first trimester this focuses primarily on beginning, middle, and end. Some students have a difficult time picking the most important part of the the beginning, middle, and end of a story -- some will even just copy the first sentence, a sentence from the middle, and a sentence from the end. As the year progresses, and more students are getting the hang of that, I have students do story maps to summarize a story by story elements: main character(s), setting, problem, and solution. This format works better for choosing the more important parts of a story to include in a summary.
Interestingly, our Houghton Mifflin program revisits summarizing frequently throughout the year, but then we test using a DRA-2. I noticed some discussion of this above. The DRA-2 (at first grade) requires a detailed retell, so I have to specifically teach my students that they will need to include all the details they can think of for the DRA test, which is not our focus throughout the rest of the year.
D. As a teacher I have to remember that students need to learn different strategies and skills for different purposes. The more clear and forthright I can be about when to use which skill, the better. For example, I need to explicitly tell students that today we will be doing a retell about our story, which includes, lots of details in the order of the story, and that they will need to do that on their year end test. Summarizing is a very important skill, and we use that for a different purpose. I found the note-taking section of this chapter very interesting. As a first grade teacher, I have never thought about teaching my students to take notes. The skill of writing in and of itself requires all of their concentrated effort. The idea of teacher prepared notes (pp. 45-46) intrigued me. A significant number of students would struggle with reading notes, however, with shared readings and the use of drawings, perhaps I can think of ways to introduce note taking to students.
I tried having my sixth grade reading class summarize information they read from a selection about ancient kingdoms in Africa that traded with one another. My students understood the importance of putting information in their own words. They saw the connection between having to summarize what they read and understanding it better. They were able to tell me why copying my notes was not a very helpful strategy for them. The main obstacle I had in my notetaking activity was getting them to care enough about the subject on which they were taking notes in order to put forth the effort to take good notes. Good notetaking is a lot of work, even for adults, and it is not a quick process. I will still consider it mostly a success because my students see greater value in the process than they did before, even if they aren't completely sold on the need to take good notes as much as the teacher would like.
I already knew that verbatim note taking was the least effective way to take notes. This is especially frustrating because I have a colleague who designs lessons for our team of three teachers to use, and it involves verbatim notetaking throughout the unit. The students are bored and they retain little of what is presented, but many of them like it because it is easy and it "feels like" learning.
Something I understand better is the frames that can be used an many summarizing situation, such as the Topic-Restriction-Illustration frame, the Definition Frame, the Argumentation Frame, and so on. I was aware that writing follows certain formats, but I had never had the formats presented as explicitly as they were in the chapter.
Something I would change about how I use summarizing in my classroom would be to make my students aware of the different frames that would work for a lot of the material they read. My class is familiar with the narrative frame, so it would be a pretty straightforward transition to start looking at other forms of text with the idea that it can be summarized in a frame.
Initially, I would provide students with the frame so that they could locate the information to summarize. The ultimate goal would be for students to recognize the different frames on their own and summarize accordingly.
Thank-you Sarah and Sam for sharing your comments. Sarah – you’ve done a tremendous job of using the gradual release of responsibility over to your students as you’ve worked on summarizing with your students throughout the year. I completely agree with your thinking on how we have to specifically and intentionally “name” and identify the differences between summarizing and retelling….as well as letting students know when they will need to use each strategy! Sam – You’re right students will put more effort in when they have an interest in the learning….were they note-taking one of your lessons….or subject matter information from a text. If so maybe there is a way to differentiate by interest when assigning them what to read/learn…take notes on? Just a thought, you probably don’t have that room for flexibility… I think that giving the children ownership over their learning (choosing the frame to support their learning) – is a great idea!
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