Tom Waters

I don't mention it much here on the leadership blog, but I've got to take a few sentences to say how proud I am of our publishing team. You author the best teaching resources! Keep up the great work. View their latest test prep resources on the teaching blog at http://teamtomeducation.com/reading-test-prep-summarizing-task-cards/ Be sure to recommend the blog to teachers you know! And teachers are saying the greatest things...which is always more than I can say! “My class loved using these!” -Natalie Asbury “My class started using these today. There are so many options and ways to use them!” -Jessica C. “This is great! Thank you ;)” -Elizabeth Liedtke “Great for workstations and exit tickets!” -Ms. W Creative Little Learners (TPT Seller) “This resource is great practice!” -Stacy B.

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...

Summarize what you read. Typical reading task, right? Yes. But it is so much more than that! Summarizing is a powerful thinking strategy that spread all academic areas and even work-related life skills. It is the ability to make decisions about information in efficient ways. More than ever, summarizing is a needed skill for the information age! Here are three ways that summarizing can benefit every classroom. A Skill for Learning Summarizing involves thinking about information. To summarize, we must rethink and reprocess what we've experienced. If we're reading, we must pause and retell what we read. Then we have to decide what was important about the text. These decisions are paraphrased into our own words and then logically ordered into a summary. That's complex! It's a skill that promotes learning. Maybe more importantly, it's a skill that increases our ability to learn...much like exercise. How can summarizing be used in a variety of settings? In a scien...

Analyze. Higher-level thinking. Rigor. We hear it! We hear it again! Every article, training, and, yes, faculty meeting. AND YES, it is quite simple to get to. Just ask... What's Wrong With That? When students are given the "bad" examples, they often find it quite fun to pick it apart - to analyze. They enjoy taking the role of judge, of expert. They try to out-smart the teacher, the author, or another thinker. By asking what's wrong with that, teachers require students to think of the nuances in a concept or skill. Embedded in the question is the process of breaking something apart and comparing each part to the ideal. For example, take the reading teacher trying to teach students the complex skill of summarizing. She very quickly gets the students to analyze when she: Teaches the underlying concepts: problem, solution, main events... Prompts students to talk about these concepts and develop understanding. Gives one good example, so students can ref...

After a quick pause, the 4th grade teacher realized she kept saying the words paraphrase, summarize, and retell, but she had never taught the students these academic words. So she put the summarizing lesson on pause, created a quick three-way foldable, and said let's talk about these words. Two or three questions into asking students what they knew about these words, and she realized - they don't know these terms. Most students thought paraphrase meant a definition. Others misconceived summarize to be the same as a retell. This was a goldmine...and the students needed this 5 minutes of direct vocabulary instruction in order to understand the rest of the real lesson. Are you teaching academic vocabulary each week? Reviewing these words periodically to deepen student understanding?  Team Tom Waters tweeted today: #academicvocabulary . 5 minutes of time every other day, can yield huge dividends. #teaching — Tom Waters (@teamtomwaters1) April 25, 2016 The conversat...