Comprehension Literacy Log 5

Summarizing Introduction and Explicit Teaching Videos
(from Blackboard Comprehension Shell)

Summarizing instruction is most effective when taught in all subject areas.  As in all effective teaching, an authentic purpose must be set.  The teacher needs to establish a focus for learning, consider assessment data that has been gathered on her students, take district and state curriculum standards into consideration, know how her students learn best, differentiate instruction and take relevant research into consideration when planning summarizing lessons.  Students must be taught to access their schema and be able to separate important information from unimportant information.  Teachers must engage in ongoing assessment, integrate talk into lessons, check for understanding, and be fully active in the teaching/learning cycle.
We have been doing main idea, author's purpose, making connections, inference, determining importance, supporting details, and summarizing lessons in reading the past couple of weeks. We do these lessons many times in each genre we study in reading.  We first did the lessons in the memoir genre but we were supposed to teach the lessons with non-fiction texts.  So we started with non-fiction, then memoir, then non-fiction again, then fairy tales, and we are about to begin studying fiction and picture books.  Summary is a difficult thing to teach.  I find my kiddos have a difficult time separating important information from unimportant information.  We have been doing extra lessons on this to make summarizing easier.  I also use the Get the Gist strategy in my classroom for main idea and summary.  We have been writing summaries for fiction texts by separating the beginning from the middle form the end of the text and then writing main idea statements for each section and then we put our statements together to make a summary.  It can be more difficult to write a summary for a non-fiction text. 
I liked the lesson framework the teacher used in the video because it is very similar to the framework I follow in my classroom and I find it quite effective.  Thinking aloud as you problem solve really gives students a chance to see your thought process and the reasons behind your decisions.  I also use learning partners with my students giving them a chance to discuss with each other their thinking before I ask them to share with the class.  Whenever I pose a question to my class and there are only one or two students raising their hands to share it's probably because I did not give my students the chance to share their thinking with their classmates first.  Once I let them partner share I usually have lots more students willing to share with the whole group.  When students do share, asking them for a rationale of their thinking is a powerful move that cannot be skipped.  I do this in all subjects.  You can never take an answer at face value.  Whether I think the answer is right or wrong I ask for their rationale being as neutral as possible. Many times my students will surprise me with their thinking and are able to back up their thinking in a way that makes sense.  I also think it is extremely important to give students time to reflect at the end of the lesson and share how they think they did, what was easy, what was tricky, what they enjoyed, what they may not have enjoyed as much, etc.