Book and Blog Post 7

Summarizing…Harder that it sounds right? What does summarizing do for a student is the better question. Clark tells us that “summarizing improves readers’ abilities to locate the main ideas and supporting details, identify and omit unnecessary details and redundant materials, remember what is read, analyze text structure and see how the ideas are related, generalize details, clarify meaning, take notes and rethink what they read so they can process it more deeply” (pg.153). 

What? A lot more detail than I originally thought it would entail. So is the ability to summarize a lost art? Not exactly the whole idea of summarizing gets disconnected from the teacher to the student; but, a good teacher explains the method in a way that is understandable to the student.

“Summarizing is when the student summarizes the reading, and extracts the most important information and turns it into wording that s/he understands” (Duran). This statement uses less confusing terminology and basically suggests the same thing. The student reads the text, writes down what s/he thinks it means in her/his own words. See what I mean it gets easier, Right? So, you might be thinking there has to be steps…Right? And the answer is YES! Here we go:

Students need to remember three important elements to summarize effectively (Clark):

1.       Keep the information brief

2.       Identify the most important ideas

3.       Mention some supporting details

This, my friends are three easy steps to assure student success in the summarization process. Of course, students learn in different ways, so how can a teacher relate the process to those who learn differently? The answer to this question is up to the teacher. S/he could adjust the lecture on their own opinion of how to relate it back to the student. As a teacher, we all need to adapt to situations as they occur, so instruction is based on case-specific scenarios. I hope this post helps…until next-time!