How to Teach Summarizing

Readers do much more than just call words and turn pages. They think. They make meaning. They pull together ideas from their prior knowledge and from the author's own intentions. There are many reasons that reading is difficult to teach. But some skills can be easily grasped with the right scaffolding.

Summarizing is a complex skill that can be made simple with the right materials. You can't just throw a text out, and then give students a summarizing worksheet. Tasks have to be carefully designed to lead students along the path.

The Path to Summarization

With literary texts, summarizing has a distinct path. It can be explicitly taught. Students can master it. Where do we begin?

We need to first ensure that students understand the concept. What is a summary? They best way to do this is to define what it is not. Many students confuse summaries with retelling and paraphrasing. When teaching summarizing, we should start by clarifying this confusion up front. Here's a post where I discuss:

the difference between summarizing, retelling and paraphrasing.

The next steps include learning the basics of a plot and then learning what to pull from a plot to make a summary. 

A plot diagram with BME

 Plot Basics

After simply knowing what a summary is, students need to understand the basics of plot. We often teach primary students beginning, middle, and ending (BME). This is the same as the three-part drama in movies and high school English. It's a basic framework for building further understanding. 

The next phase for BME is to show a plot diagram and teach more complex plot concepts. Students in 2nd and 3rd grade can begin to master the terms plot, problem, and solution. That helps them grasp the essence of literary plots.

The beginning of the plot, the exposition, is where information is "exposed". The characters and the setting are described. The beginning helps the read want to read the story.

The middle is where the main events occur. These includes the rising actions, the problem or conflict, and the climax. A story is no good without problems and conflicts. Literature is about solving problems...or trying but failing.

The ending is the resolution of the plot. This is where the author tells us whether the solution resolved (fixed) the problem or not. The is where the story ends, and we found out how the solution affected the characters.

How? Scaffolding.

Yeah, we all know about the plot, but what does that have to do with summarizing. Everything!

We can't just have students learn the vocabulary words for plot, problem, solution, etc... We must use tasks that engage students in reading plots and questioning what the problem and solution are. This is summarization scaffolding. 

Students in grades 2 and 3 (ages8-10) can easily learn the plot structure and problem/solution. They can learn to identify them in texts and even become good at predicting plot events. This is so critical to good summarizing skills.

More than Main Events! Often we mistakenly ask students to retell the main events with the ol' "Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then" formula. This is a decent way to retell a story, but retelling is not the same as summarizing. 

A good summary always includes the problem and solution. A detailed summary will also include main events from the beginning, middle, and ending. Here's a TeamTom 2-day Lesson on "A Good Summary".

We have repeatedly design instructional tasks that have the scaffolding built into the questions. Instead of jumping straight to summarizing, the questions have to build through the basic plot concepts. Students have to practice or try out their understandings over time. They don't learn simply by looking up a word or reading it in their textbooks before a story.

Then, and only then, they can start to identify these aspects in summaries. Then they can find the BME, the problem, and the solution in summaries. Without scaffolding, a summary is just another confusing paragraph. But, with scaffolding, over time, they can quickly identify the most critical parts of a good summary.
The importance of quality questioning can not be overstated. Read how questions can create the path to critical thinking.

Also, here are 4 other types of scaffolds that increase learning!

For great ideas on Summarizing, see our Summarizing Pinterest Board.

Visit our store to find best-selling Summarizing Task Cards.

Thanks for Reading!