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Summarization60 Innovative, Tech-Infused Strategies

for Deeper Student Learning

RICK WORMELI withDedra Stafford

2 n d E d i t i o n

IN ANY SUBJECT

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wormeli, Rick, author.Title: Summarization in any subject: 60 innovative, tech-infused strategies for deeper student learning / by Rick Wormeli, with Dedra Stafford.Description: Second edition. | Alexandria, Virginia: ASCD, [2019] | First edition: 2005. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018025778 (print) | LCCN 2018026704 (ebook) | ISBN 9781416626794 (PDF) | ISBN 9781416626770 | ISBN 9781416626770qpaperback | ISBN 9781416626794qpdf e-bookSubjects: LCSH: Communication in education. | Abstracting. | Cognitive learning.Classification: LCC LB1033.5 (ebook) | LCC LB1033.5. W67 2018 (print) | DDC 371.39--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025778

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2Summarizing Savvy


8 SUMMARIZATION IN ANY SUBJECT

Summarizing is not magical, nor is it an innate skill that some of us have and others do not have. Harry Potter can summarize his potions text without his wand. The big secrets of how to summarize are no secrets at all: students have to be tenacious, they have to practice, they have to learn multiple methods of summarizing, and they must be inclined to revise their thinking as perspec-tive and information warrant.

There are common practices that lead to more effective summarizations. Let’s begin our discussion of them by first looking at an original text and its summarization.

Original text:

The Sea Around Us made Rachel Carson famous; the last book she wrote, Silent Spring, brought her enemies (among some pow-erful interest groups). It took courage to write that book. It was a look at a grim subject—pesticides—and how they were poisoning the earth and its inhabitants. In Silent Spring, Carson attacked the chemical and food-processing industries and the Depart-ment of Agriculture.

They lost no time in fighting back. Rachel Carson was mocked and ridiculed as a “hysterical woman.” Her editor wrote, “Her opponents must have realized . . . that she was questioning not only the indiscriminate use of poisons but the basic irre-sponsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the natural world.”

But the fury and fervor of the attacks only brought her more readers. President Kennedy asked for a special report on pesticides from his Science Advisory Committee. The report confirmed what Carson had written, and it made important recommendations for curtailing and controlling the use of pesticides.

The public, which had been generally unaware of the dan-ger of the poisons sprayed on plants, was now aware. Modestly, Rachel Carson said that one book couldn’t change things but on that she may have been wrong.

—Joy Hakim, A History of US, 2002, p.91

Summary:

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring angered many people when it was pub-lished. The book opened the public’s eyes to the devastating use of pesticides


SUMMARIZINg SAvvY 9

on animals and plants, and it attacked companies that used them callously. The companies ridiculed Carson and her work, but the government inves-tigated her claims and found they were true. The government responded to the danger by regulating pesticide use.

How did the summarizer know which portions to bring together to form the final summary? The answer lies in specific practices teachers use to increase their students’ summarizing success.

This is not something innate in humans, especially in K–12 students. It has to be specifically taught. Many secondary teachers and college profes-sors, however, assume student capacity that’s not in evidence: they think their students know how to summarize, capture the gist, or write an abstract on a topic, research study, or experience, but in truth, students haven’t had specific instruction on the process. Some students catch on better than oth-ers because they’re better at figuring out the rules of classroom survival or expectations of school systems, whereas others have more difficulty under-standing summarization and believe it’s a waste of time. We can’t just compel them with breathy conviction, nor can we show them a good summarization and direct them to do something akin to that example. We have to make the case for its use and give them specific tools to make summarization not only doable but also helpful.

Preparing the Brain for Summarization

Building Personal Background“One of the great things about being a professor of English,” writes Thomas

C. Foster (2014), “is that you get to keep meeting old friends.” Foster is open-ing readers’ minds to the connections between the text we’re reading and our prior experiences, explaining how that experience shapes what we discern as salient:

For beginning readers, though, every story may seem new, and the resulting experience of reading is highly disjointed. Think of reading, on one level, as one of those papers from elementary school where you connect the dots. I could never see the picture in a connect-the-dots drawing until I’d put in virtually every line. Other kids could look at a page full of dots and say, “Oh, that’s an elephant,” “That’s a locomotive.” Me, I saw dots. I think it’s partly predisposition—some people handle two-dimensional



visualization better than others—but largely a matter of practice: the more connect-the-dot drawings you do, the more likely you are to recognize the design early on. Same with literature. Part of pattern recognition is talent, but a whole lot of it is practice: if you read enough and give what you read enough thought, you begin to see patterns, archetypes, recurrences. And as with those pictures among the dots, it’s a matter of learning to look. Not just to look but where to look, and how to look. Literature, as the great Canadian critic Northrop Frye observed, grows out of oth-er literature; we should not be surprised to find, then, that it also looks like other literature. As you read, it may pay to remember this: there’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature. Once you know that, you can go looking for old friends and ask-ing the attendant question: “now where have I seen her before?”

—(Foster, 2014, pp. 23–24)

There’s no getting around it: a student’s personal background with a topic shapes the summary that he or she creates. If the student lacks background in the topic, its summarization is more difficult and may be skewed dramatically from what the teacher expected. If the student has extended background in the topic, it comes more naturally and may be more in line with the teacher’s expectations.

Depending on the learner’s context, then, summarizations will vary. For example, asking both a student who is passionate about baseball and a stu-dent who has never played or watched a baseball game to summarize the life of a famous baseball player will yield very different results. Some Southerners call the Civil War “the War of Northern Aggression,” and the connotations of that perspective affect how they absorb the information when reading about that period of United States history.

Imagine the varied experiences of three different people—a theologian, an expert on chaos theory, and someone with no professional interest in sci-ence or religion who wants to read a spirited adventure while on vacation—who read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Or imagine Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad being read by an alternative history buff, a civil rights advocate, a sociologist, a young black/white/Latino/Asian/Syrian high school student, and a politician recently elected in a divisive election. What would each of these readers take away from the experience? In each scenario, indi-vidual readers with different backgrounds take away something significantly different from the book. Experience is the filter through which input passes


SUMMARIZINg SAvvY 11

on its way to the cognitive centers of the brain. Good teachers embrace the process, even to the point of orchestrating experience and background so that new learning is processed in specific ways.

To enable students to take from text or learning experiences what we want them to take as they summarize, we must ensure they begin summa-rizing with enough background knowledge to gather intended meaning. In some situations, this means creating background where there was none, and that process might take a whole class period or two before the real summari-zation and learning occur. For example, before Rick’s science students read and summarize an article about how microscopes work, they’ll handle actual microscopes: adjusting the light source and objectives, clamping slides to the stage, and focusing the lens on what’s under the coverslip. When they read the technical passage on microscopes afterward, they don’t exhibit that glazed-eye look. They process everything in the article more readily and securely because they explored the microscope earlier: they attach the article content to material already in storage.

Not all background contexts can be hands-on like the one just described, however. Often, experienced teachers can circumnavigate a hands-on expe-rience by showing a two-minute YouTube clip to build context for a forth-coming lesson. A quick online trip to see the sights, sounds, and magnitude of the Amazon rainforest can help students’ understanding when they study deforestation or biomes. No matter how it is written, text has more meaning because of a student’s prior knowledge. Because very little enters long-term memory unless it’s related to something already there, it is vital to create that initial foundation onto which students can attach new learning.

Can we summarize when we do close reading, using only the content in the text before us? Yes, to some degree. But what we pull from text to include in our summaries is heavily influenced by what we perceive as the author’s pur-pose, the text’s intended audience, our background with the topic itself, and the maturity of our critical thinking. When a teacher asks elementary school students to highlight important points in text, for example, they highlight the whole page, because they think if it’s published in a book, it’s all import-ant, and they don’t want to leave out anything others find important. In high school, students are more selective, because they’ve read a lot more and can distinguish among purpose, structure, and content. Students have more life experience with academics at that point, too, which informs their decisions. So yes, people can summarize as they do close reading, but the summary is not as high quality as it would be when they read with extended background in the topic.



Priming the BrainThe capacity to summarize when close reading is brought into sharp relief

in a discussion of the power of priming. Pat Wolfe (2010) writes that the brain needs to be primed in order to pay attention and determine what’s mean-ingful in text or experience. For example, it would be a waste of time—even hurtful—for us to ask students near the beginning of the school year to read Chapter 17 of their history textbook and determine what’s important enough in it to summarize. That would be the same as asking students to watch a 50-minute video on gravitational waves and saying nothing to them ahead of time except, “Take notes.” They would write everything or nothing. This is really an act of transcribing, not meaningful note-taking, and it’s instruction-ally worrisome; students are overwhelmed, and very little content goes into long-term memory. If we ask students instead to, “Watch this video and focus on how these gigantic accelerating objects like black holes and neutron stars orbiting each other can disrupt space and time as Einstein predicted back in 1916” or, “Note the back-and-forth contrast between earlier knowledge and current knowledge with each of the five concepts depicted,” then students’ minds have a focus; the brain pays attention. Students can do something with the information, which increases the likelihood of its permanent storage in memory.

“I can” learning targets have been used in primary classrooms for years as one way to prime before learning. A new model popping up in classrooms and across Pinterest expands “I can” statements into a format that is ideal for middle and high schools. The learning target is broken down into three parts: “Today I will . . . ”; “So that I can . . . ”; and “I’ll know I’m successful when . . . .” Often, school districts require teachers to post objectives in the class-room, but the reason why students should see and know the objectives is lost in the mandate. Priming the brain is the power behind this daily ritual, and we encourage you to embrace it and make it your own.

Here are a few examples:

Today I will . . . create a 3-D model illustrating the phases of mitosis.So that I can . . . understand the role of cellular division (mitosis) in pro-

ducing complex organisms.I will know I am successful when . . . I can describe and explain the phases

of mitosis to someone and explain their importance.

Today I will . . . analyze the characters of Brave New World by creating character maps.



So that I can . . . connect key attributes of the novel’s characters to the plot and theme of the book.

I will know I am successful when . . . I can accurately describe character traits and how each character relates to others by using evidence from the text.

A great way to show the importance of priming the brain before reading and summarizing is to ask students to read an esoteric passage about some-thing with which they have little familiarity and to write a brief summary of the information afterward. Don’t set a purpose for their reading, and don’t provide any background. Then ask them to do the same task with another article of similar difficulty, but this time, give them a specific focus for their thinking and some background on the topic before they begin the task. Once done, have them compare the quality of the two summaries. They’ll be mark-edly different. For further evidence, give students a quiz on the material after each experience. The scores will be better on the material with which they were given purpose and background before reading. Cris Tovani’s I Read It, But I Don’t Get It (2001) has an excellent discussion of priming the brain and providing background knowledge. It is highly recommended.

Particularly powerful background: vocabulary! Almost every month, a newly published study indicates a correlation between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension and, by association, the capacity to summarize, for we cannot summarize what we do not comprehend. There are hundreds of books with powerful vocabulary building ideas, several dozen of which focus on academic vocabulary, such as the highly recommended Building Back-ground Knowledge for Academic Achievement: Research on What Works in Schools by Robert Marzano (2004).

The premise with vocabulary here is straightforward: understanding both content (e.g., specific content terms such as “diffusion” and “osmosis” in a life science class) and general academic vocabulary (such as “compare and con-trast,” “synthesize,” “elaborate”) may be the most significant factor in stu-dents’ successful summarization of any subject. It’s worth our time and effort to teach vocabulary for its own sake but also to help students make connec-tions between vocabulary knowledge and academic success.

Under the umbrella of vocabulary acquisition, we find word walls. These large, conspicuous places in the classroom can be seen from all angles in the classroom (don’t forget that the ceiling can work as an instructional sur-face). On these walls, we record vocabulary terms we want students to use in



everyday academic language, or at least in class discussions in our particular discipline. We’ll put everything on these walls: symbols used in our subject studies, content words for the unit of study, useful academic language, and general vocabulary for growing citizens and young adults. The premise is sim-ple: if it’s in sight, it’s in mind; if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. So we put these words and symbols in sight.

Rick has used word walls for years in both elementary and secondary class-rooms. He’s done experiments in which he presented the same vocabulary to all of his secondary classes, but in some classes, he posted word walls, and in others, he did not. He was stunned by the number of vocabulary terms that students in classes with word walls adopted as their own, using them mean-ingfully in conversation and in class writing, simply because of the visual presence of those terms each day. He didn’t call attention to them after stu-dents’ initial introduction to the word wall, but he did use the words as much as he could equally in classes both with and without word walls in an effort to normalize their use. Students in middle and high school often “try on” new words, like trying on new clothing, and they gauge the reaction of others to their use of the word, and, well, gosh, once you use a word meaningfully, you own it. Having words with which they feel comfortable and can readily find increases in verbal dexterity and thereby summarization success.

In addition to Marzano’s (2004) book, we highly recommend the follow-ing books for their inspiration and research-based practicality as a way to start teaching vocabulary:

• Words, Words, Words: Teaching Vocabulary in Grades 4–12 by Janet Allen (1999)

• Inside Words: Tools for Teaching Academic Vocabulary, Grades 4–12 by Janet Allen (2007)

• Vocabulary Instruction: Research to Practice (2nd ed.) by Edward J. Kame’enui and James F. Baumann (2012)

• Tools for Teaching Academic Vocabulary by Janet Allen (2014)• 101 Strategies to Make Academic Vocabulary Stick by Marilee Sprenger

(2017)• Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning by Peter

H. Johnston (2004)• Teaching the Critical Vocabulary of the Common Core: 55 Words That

Make or Break Student Understanding by Marilee Sprenger (2013)• Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction (2nd ed.) by

Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, and Linda Kucan (2013)



Embracing the Brain’s Need for Structures

Teach Students to Identify a Text’s Underlying StructureIn our experience, students understand—and summarize—best the text

structures with which they are most familiar. It’s important, then, for teachers in every subject area to teach their students about the various ways authors structure text and about the various graphic formats they can use to summa-rize that text effectively. For example, if your students are reading an article about two systems of government, you want them to be able to pick up on the text’s compare-and-contrast structure and know that a good way to summa-rize the article’s information would be to use a Venn diagram: two interlocking circles, with the unique characteristics for each government system recorded in the outer portions of the individual circles and common characteristics of the two systems recorded in the area in which the circles overlap. If the article is a comparison of four types of government (or more), you want students to know that a matrix structure, with the systems of government arranged along the vertical axis and attributes of those systems along the horizontal axis, would be an effective way of summarizing the information.

Most written text is presented in one of the following structures or in a combination of two or more: enumeration, chronological order, compare and contrast, cause and effect, and claim and evidence (problem and solution). Here’s a closer look at each, accompanied by examples. You can find additional illustrations of the suggested summary structures throughout this book.

EnumerationEnumeration focuses on listing facts, characteristics, features, or a com-

bination of those. Signal words and phrases include “to begin with”; “first”; “second”; “third”; “then”; “next”; “finally”; “several”; “numerous”; “for exam-ple”; “for instance”; “in fact”; “most important”; “also”; and “in addition.”

Original text:

The moon is our closest neighbor. It’s 250,000 miles away. Its gravity is only one-sixth that of Earth. Thus, a boy weighing 120 pounds in, say, Vir-ginia would weigh only 20 pounds on the moon. In addition, there is no atmosphere on the moon. The footprints left by astronauts back in 1969 are still there, as crisply formed as they were on the day they were made. The lack of atmosphere also means there is no water on the moon, an important problem for traveling there.



Suggested summarization formats for enumeration structures include mind maps; webs (wheel-and-spoke outline); vertical outlines; concentric circles; Cornell notes; matrices; the Frayer Model; word sorting and other categorizing/classifying structures; main idea with supporting detail sections; and staircase organizers, with major points on each step and connections to other ideas written on the vertical risers and railings. Many of these models are available as visuals in interactive whiteboard software and online, including SMART Notebook® and Promethean Flipcharts. Following is an example:

Distance and Dimensions Atmosphere

Closest to Earth,250,000 miles

None, and no water,either, astronauts’footprints still there

1/6 grav. of Earth

Gravity Exploration

Moon

Chronological OrderChronological, or time, order refers to structures in which facts, events,

and concepts are described in sequence according to time references. Signal words include “during”; after”; “before”; “gradually”; “not long after”; “now”; “on (date)”; “since”; “when”; and “while.”

Original text:

Astronomy came a long way in the 1500s and 1600s. In 1531, what we now know as Halley’s Comet made an appearance and caused great panic. Just 12 years later, Copernicus realized that the sun, not Earth, was the center of the solar system, and astronomy became a way to understand the natural world, not something to fear. In the early part of the next century, Galileo made the first observations with a new instrument—the telescope. A generation later, Sir Isaac Newton invented the reflecting telescope, which is very similar to what we use today. Halley’s Comet returned in 1682 and it was viewed as a scientific wonder, studied by Edmund Halley.



Suggested summarization formats for chronological structures include timelines, flowcharts, mind maps, calendars, and clock faces. Here’s an example:

1500 17001600

Halley’sCometappears,wide-spreadpanic

Copernicus:Suncenter ofsolarsystem;we don’tfearastronomy

Galileousestelescope

Newton:Reflectingtelescope

Halley’sCometreturns— “ascientificwonder;"no panic this time.

Compare and ContrastCompare-and-contrast structures clarify similarities and differences. Sig-

nal words include “whereas”; “although”; “as well as”; “but”; “conversely”; “either”; “however”; “not only”; “on the one hand” and “on the other hand”; “or”; “rather than”; “similarly”; “unless”; and “unlike.”

Original text:

Middle school gives students more autonomy than does elementary school. Students are asked to be responsible for their learning in both levels; however, middle school students have more pressure to complete assign-ments on their own rather than rely on adults. In addition, narrative forms are used to teach most literacy skills in elementary school. [But] expository writing is the way most information is given in middle school.

Suggested summarization formats for compare-and-contrast struc-tures include Venn diagrams, T-charts, similarities/differences flowcharts, matrices, the Frayer Model, and double-bubble maps. Here’s an example:



Student autonomy

Student responsibility

for learning

How student completes most

assignments

Writing type most used to teach

literacy

Middle school High High On own Expository

Elementary school

Low Low With teacher or parent help

Narrative

Cause and EffectCause-and-effect structures show how something can happen as a result

of something else having happened. Signal words include “accordingly”; “as a result”; “because”; “consequently”; “nevertheless”; “so that”; “therefore”; “this led to”; and “thus.”

Original text:

Drug abuse often starts during upper elementary school. Students exper-iment with a parent’s beer and hard liquor, enjoying the buzz they receive. They keep doing this, and it starts taking more and more of the alcohol to get the same level of buzz. As a result, the children turn to other forms of stim-ulation, including marijuana. These steps can lead to more hard-core drugs, such as angel dust (PCP), heroin, and crack cocaine; consequently, mari-juana and alcohol are known as “gateway drugs.” Because of their addictive nature, these gateway drugs lead many youngsters who use them into the world of hard-core drugs.

Suggested summarization formats for cause-and-effect structures include flowcharts; webs; so-called herringbones; cluster graphics; wheel-and-spoke outlines; and trait analyses. Here’s an example:



In elementary school, kidsexperiment with parents’ beer/liquor

Over time, it takes morealcohol to get the same buzz

Kids turn to other drugs(e.g., marijuana)

Marijuana use leads toPCP, heroin, and crack use

Alcohol and marijuana aregateways to hard-core drugs

Claim and EvidenceClaim-and-evidence structures are similar to cause-and-effect structures.

They explain how a difficult situation, issue, puzzle, or conflict developed and then describe what was done to solve it. Signal words are the same as those for cause-and-effect structures.

Original text:

The carrying capacity of a habitat refers to the amount of plant and ani-mal life that its resources can hold. For example, if only 80 pounds of food is available and there are animals that together need more than 80 pounds of food to survive, one or more animals will die—the habitat can’t “carry” them. Humans have reduced many habitats’ carrying capacity by imposing limit-ing factors on them. Limiting factors include housing developments, road construction, dams, pollution, fires, and acid rain. So that forest habitats can maintain full carrying capacities, Congress has enacted legislation that pro-tects endangered habitats from human development or consequences. As a result, these areas have high carrying capacities and an abundance of plant and animal life.



Suggested summarization formats for problem-solution structures also mirror those for cause-and-effect structures: flowcharts, webs, “her-ringbones,” cluster graphics, wheel-and-spoke outlines, and trait analyses. Following is an example:

Solution:Congressional action to

restrict all limiting factors ofhuman origin in habitatswhere carrying capacity

is in danger

Habitat resources—food, water, shelter, spacing

Number of animals usingthose resources

Housing developments

Fire

Road construction

Dams

Pollution

Acid rain

Teach Students to Follow Clues to Meaning

Most students in the upper grades are familiar with the most common and effective kinds of writing, such as expository writing and persuasive writing. However, it’s important to make sure that students get a sense of general expository and persuasive structures. For example, expository writing often begins with an introduction, continues with several paragraphs of explana-tion, and ends with a one-paragraph conclusion. A persuasive piece, such as a political speech or a newspaper editorial, generally puts its strongest arguments at the beginning and the end, not in the middle. Although these



are simple structures, they can elude many students, and it’s worth stressing them repeatedly in your classes.

One valuable clue to meaning is a topic sentence. A topic sentence refers to the topic of the paragraph or section of text and the claim that the author makes about it. For example, in the sentence “Dogs are great pets,” “dogs” is the topic and “are great pets” is the claim made about it. The topic sentence of a paragraph may not always be so clearly stated, and it may be in the middle or end of a paragraph, not merely at the beginning.

Sometimes a topic sentence is just implied—it’s up to the reader to tease it out by combining fragments of several sentences or to combine an intended topic with its perceived claim. Wise teachers give students repeated practice in determining the topic sentences of various paragraphs. (See the Appen-dixes for sample text and a practice activity.) Try it right now: what’s the topic of this chapter? (Hint: identify the main topic of this section, then consider what you think we’re declaring about it.)

Why emphasize these structures? Knowing how text is put together helps students know where to look to find the key information. For example, the paragraphs that construct persuasive pieces will contain clues to the ele-ments of the argument. To help your students find what’s important in a piece of text, teach them to begin their search within specific paragraphs. For instance, the first and last sentences of a paragraph are often full of clues as to what’s important in that paragraph. Any boldfaced or italicized words are additional clues and always worth investigating. Text size and a change in the font are also indicators of importance, particularly in advertising copy or written directions. Information pulled from the text and set off with a border or shading usually signals something worth remembering. By teaching your students some of the signal words mentioned previously, you can orient them further to both the logic of the text and the importance of each piece of infor-mation it contains.

As anyone who’s taken a college literature course in the past 40 years will attest, a “text” does not have to be a written document. Be sure to teach students to follow clues to meaning that are present in nonwritten text situ-ations as well. For example, point out how lecturers often forecast their argu-ments with statements such as, “Here are the three points I want to make,” and underscore the most important things they’ve talked about (and the most important things for anyone taking notes on the lecture to write down) with phrases such as, “In conclusion . . . .” Mention, too, that audio texts frequently incorporate repetition to continually point to what’s important and keep the listener engaged. Remind students of the latest politician’s often-repeated



tagline or an annoying commercial jingle to help them grasp the power that repetition has to focus a listener’s attention.

It is also to address clues to meaning within “visual texts” such as photo-graphs, movies, Instagram pictures, websites, magazine layouts, and adver-tisements. When we look at photographs and graphic displays, we might consider the framing of the scene in the photo or graphic, what’s left out of the frame, the balance of color or objects in the photo, the shading, the lighting, what’s in focus, and what’s out of focus in order to “read” what the photogra-pher considered salient. Teach students to note how movies are edited and framed, how perspectives are chosen and not chosen, what scenes are shown and not shown, and how the music helps to evoke a mood or foreshadow what’s to come.

Finally, it’s helpful to guide students through multiple experiences in which they analyze nonwritten text media in terms of the designer’s intent and how he or she has elevated the important elements so that they would really stick with the viewer. Ask these kinds of questions:

• What are the important aspects of the museum display, and how do we know they are the important aspects?

• How do we know what’s important on this food can label, and is what we consider important the same thing that the manufacturer thinks is important?

• What is the salient information to be gleaned from this television commercial, and how did the producers of the commercial make that information salient for the viewer?

• When we look at a website, how do we know what is important and what should fade into the visual background?

All of the latest texts, videos, and other visuals teaching students about visual literacy will help here. With a little practice, students get very good at following these sorts of clues to meaning, which enhances their analytical ability and their media savvy. For inspiration and practical tips, we highly rec-ommend the following resources:

• Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy by Frank Serafini (2013)

• The Teacher’s Guide to Media Literacy: Critical Thinking in a Multimedia World by Cyndy L. Scheibe and Faith Rogow (2011)

• Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills by Nancy Frey and Douglas B. Fisher (2008)



• Using Content-Area Graphic Texts for Learning: A Guide for Middle-Level Educators by Meryl Jaffe and Katie Monnin (2013)

• I See What You Mean: Visual Literacy K–8 (2nd ed.) by Steve Moline (2011)

• Graphics for Learning: Proven Guidelines for Planning, Designing, and Evaluating Visuals in Training Materials (2nd ed.) by Ruth C. Clark and Chopeta Lyons (2010)

Introduce Students to Metaphors and Analogies

Analogies are extremely useful in summarizing, which is why it’s important to explain and model the concept. Rick shares one moment from his own class-room here in which students were particularly perceptive and made good use of analogies:

I once taught students about the unscrupulous Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall in New York City during the mid-1800s. When it came time for them to process the information, I asked groups to make analogies between what we learned about Boss Tweed and parts of the human body (minus the genita-lia, for obvious reasons). After an extended discussion, one group presented a drawing of a stick-figure human with an arrow pointing to a Valen-tine-shaped heart drawn in the center of the figure’s torso. A paragraph next to the arrow explained how Boss Tweed was like the human heart. I confess that the clash between traditional associations of the heart as a source of love, caring, and nurture and the awful corruption of Boss Tweed made me respond prematurely.

“Come on,” I told the students. “The heart? How can you back that up? He was the opposite of what the heart is normally considered to influence.”

One of the students confronted me. “Wait a minute, Mr. Wormeli. Boss Tweed donated some of his money to charities. That made him look good in the public’s eye, and he needed to manipulate the masses from time to time. It was still a good deed. The heart is associated with caring acts.”

“Yes, but that’s one small side of Boss Tweed,” I interjected. “What about all his other acts? What about—?”

One student flashed his open palm in the air to stop me. “Wait. We’re not done,” he said.



“Boss Tweed gave the city money to help it through tough times. He always got something out of it, but he kept departments going when there was trouble. He pumped money and influence into the city to give it life. Isn’t that what the human heart does for the human body—pump blood throughout the body to give it life?”

All eyes shot from the student to me for a counterpoint. I was silent a moment before breaking into a smile. What a sorry world this would be if my students were limited to my creativity.

“Touché,” I said. “You did it. You saw more than one side. I couldn’t have done it.”

With each group’s example, we discussed whether or not the analogy was accurate and complete. We even pursued other correlations as we com-pared Boss Tweed and the human body. In the end, the discussion was more important than the final drawing and written analogies. In each analogy, we isolated critical attributes and argued the merits of various symbolic rep-resentations of those attributes. The complex process resulted in students retaining more long-term information than they would have in most other assignments. I’m glad I didn’t settle for “Describe Boss Tweed” or “Answer the four comprehension questions at the end of the textbook chapter” for my assessment.

Humans ceaselessly compare.. It’s the way we interact with the world. It started with basic of ideas of survival classifying—“This will help me” and “That will hurt me”—and it’s grown into “That idea is just like . . . ,” “This con-cept is similar to . . . ,” and “Although this is similar, there’s enough subtle dif-ference to warrant new nomenclature.” We seek patterns in everything, and anomalies leap at us. Since primary grades, we have been asked, “Which one of these is not like the other?” We describe many abstract ideas in terms of physical attributes and forces—“There was strong pushback in the debate” and “The interface between the two theories is . . . ”—and we mine data.

Many students cannot process course content because they do not under-stand the metaphors we’re using to describe it. If we find a more representa-tive target for our analogue, or maybe one that related closely to something the students understood better than the one we used initially, students achieve can that “Aha!” connection; it’s revelatory. Moreover, because of the social nature of the brain and the instructional power of argumentation, the genesis, defense, and critique of metaphors and their subset, analogies, are among the most effective instructional strategies, and they lead to long-term retention! To ask a student to summarize content and experiences by



generating three or four analogies requires them to consider specific details in view of larger contexts and make connections, which is exactly what the brain craves.

Metaphors and analogies are a part of the broader field of cognitive linguis-tics. It’s studying their strategic applications to K–12 learning in all subjects, not just in language arts and English. To get started on using them in your class, consider Rick’s book, Metaphors & Analogies: Power Tools for Teaching Any Subject (2009).

Chunk Text and Learning Experiences

Long text passages can be daunting to someone learning to summarize. The brain will more effectively process information that is “chunked” into shorter segments for a summary en route to understanding the full passage. Breaking text into segments does not dilute its message; rather, it presents the message in a way that enhances student learning. When students encounter informa-tion in these smaller segments, more of it goes into their long-term memories. Consider breaking learning experiences, lectures, and readings into shorter segments before asking your students to summarize them. As an authority on both the content you’re teaching and about how your students learn best, you can preview your curriculum (a section of text, a particular concept you’ll be demonstrating, a topic you’ll be discussing) and determine the best way to present it to your students.

Here’s an example: In Appendix A, you’ll find the Gettysburg Address. If we were to just hand a group of students this whole speech and ask them to make sense of it, most students would come away understanding only that it is short and not very memorable. Their retention would improve dramat-ically if we took some time to break down the speech with them. Assuming that we’ve already provided historical context, defined difficult vocabulary, and read through it aloud once so students can hear voice inflections to aid comprehension, the next step to successful student learning is to “chunk” the speech into meaningful segments. There are lots of ways we might group larger sections into shorter sections, but one helpful way is focus on those transition words:

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this con-tinent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposi-tion that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war,

gettysburg Address



testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war.

Does anything here suggest a natural shift in the content? Yes. Lincoln begins by alluding to the past (“ago”), but then he starts the second paragraph with the word “Now.” This creates a timeline of sorts, contrasting where we were with where we are today (in his time). Therefore, we might chunk the first section according to the time period referenced. Depending on my students’ readiness, we could also simplify things by first offering this cut-out-the-fat version of the first sentence: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Once we’re sure everyone has grasped the meaning of these words, we would add Lincoln’s clarifying phrases, “on this continent” and “conceived in Liberty” in their proper places, discussing with students why Lincoln added them. As an alternative, we might chunk this presentation by asking students to focus on one or two essential questions, such as, “What was Lincoln’s pur-pose for the speech?” and “Did he succeed?” Examination of the text reveals several clues to Lincoln’s intent, such as, “We have come to dedicate” and “we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full mea-sure of devotion—that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain.”

In Recording and Representing Knowledge (2015), Ria Schmidt and Robert Marzano declare the feasibility of chunking for summarization, but they add two necessary follow-up steps: first, ask students to “think of a key word or phrase sums up each chunk,” and “combine the key words or phrases from each chunk into a summary sentence” (p. 17). In the Gettysburg Address example, then, students identify key words and phrases that capture the gist of each section they’ve chunked, and then they put them in language strings, forming sentences that constitute the general summary.

When first teaching students something experiential, we focus on practic-ing new behaviors in short chunks. When teaching students to write in cur-sive, for instance, we ask them to practice specific strokes that are subsets of the more complicated ones they’ll do later, when they write capital letters. In band or orchestra, we sometimes ask students to practice a measure or two over and over until playing those measures is almost automatic, and then we ask students to practice the transition into those measures until the transi-tions, too, are smooth. We’re able to set up these focus segments best if we’ve considered ways to chunk experiences ahead of teaching them to students, but there are times when inspiration hits, and we chunk things differently



right on the spot. Embrace those moments; they may be some of your best moments as a teacher. In short, chunking text or experiences requires teach-ers to look at the bottom line of what we want students to learn: the essential and enduring aspects we are trying to teach.

When it’s helpful, we diagram the text or experience ourselves before teaching, and we play with the structures a little to see which ones increase the likelihood that students will learn the material. The more we do it, the easier it gets. If the material is new to us, we can still do a good job presenting it in chunks; this is a great time to try out a presentation with a mentor or col-league and ask for a critique.

Give Students Tools for Encountering Text

Before students can summarize a piece of writing, they have to know what’s in it. In order to know what’s in it, they have to be conscious of it. This sounds obvious, but a surprising number of students read a passage of text and have no awareness of what they read. They don’t engage with the text in any way; they simply pass their eyes across the words. We can compare it to the way we sometimes “zone out” when driving long distances, suddenly realizing that we don’t recall anything about the last 20 minutes of our trip. “Gosh,” we think, “I hope I didn’t miss my turn.” Teaching students how to approach text mindfully—and giving them the tools they need to do so—is essential for promoting summarization savvy.

Repeated reading. Good summarizers read text passages at least twice: once to get the general overview, and then again to determine what is salient. In our fast-paced world, persuading students to take the time to read pas-sages twice may be difficult, but the practice will be among the more mature attributes they gain. Stress to students that, as readers, they can determine what is significant only when they have a general view of what’s coming. As they decipher each sentence, they use the lines that precede and succeed that sentence. They can’t do that in the first read-through because they have access only to the preceding sentence and the current one. The second time through, they’ll have a better idea of their purpose for reading and how each line they’re reading fits into the whole.

Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis have an effective variation of this strategy in their book Strategies That Work (2007) that they called “Your Importance/Author Importance.” In this activity, students read through the given text and record what they find important to themselves first. Harvey



and Goudvis recommend asking students to delineate their ideas in two col-umns: “Things of Interest to Me” and “Things I Think Are Important.” Then students reread the text, but this time they focus on what they think the author—not they—thought was important and the most crucial part: why they think as they do. It really helps students focus on a summarization’s primary purpose, which is to capture what the author/presenter thought was import-ant enough to share with the reader or viewer, not the students’ own com-mentary about it.

Dedra uses a similar activity called “Me to We.” Each student writes what he or she believes to be important (or his or her response to a teacher inquiry) on a sticky note individually (the “Me” response); then they move to a group setting in which they discuss the summary or response to the teacher inquiry and then devise a group opinion about it (the “We” response). Then, as a group, they compare their opinion to what they perceive as the author’s gist or response to the teacher inquiry.

Making Notations and Marking Text

Once we know why we’re reading a certain text, we need to make the notes that will help us interact with the text and speak and write about it intelli-gently. Students often read something but still don’t know what to think about it. Reading notations are a way of breaking text into smaller pieces, which makes it easy to gather essential details and construct a response. They are well worth teaching, modeling, and using. For the notations themselves, you and your students should feel free to make up your own symbols. Some-one just getting started might try the following:

P I agree with this.X I disagree with this.?? I’m confused by this.! Wow! (It elicits a strong emotion.)CL The statement is a general claim.EV Here is evidence for the claim (these symbols can be numbered

to indicate their sequence too: EV1, EV2, EV3, and so forth).

Notice that the first two aren’t “I understand this” and “I don’t understand this.” Asking students to agree or disagree with something requires them to take a stance, something that they must back up with evidence or a rationale.



They must make a personal investment in the meaning; thus, they internalize the concept.

If students are not allowed to write or mark in books and materials, they can use sticky pads (such as Post-it® notes), highlighting tape, or erasable highlighters. Multicolored sticky pads come in varied sizes and are great for marking notations and identifying excerpts for later reference. Highlighting tape is a very thin, vinyl-like, reusable tape that students can use to underline sentences, to frame paragraphs, or to place vertically along a passage to mark it for future reference. The tape lies flat on the page so that students can close their books without affecting the book’s binding. It comes in different colors that can be used to mark different text attributes. The tape peels off the book page with no damage to the page or print and can be reused.

Any and all content that is digitized can be annotated any number of ways with these and other constructs on tablets, iPads, laptops, Kindles, Nooks, or smartphones. The point is to make sure students have the opportunities and formats/colors to respond to text with a helpful organizing structure. After they have read the text and made notations in light pencil, in erasable high-lighter, on Post-it® notes, or with digital tools, they’re ready to summarize because they have a handle on the content. In class discussions, momentum isn’t stopped by students scanning line by line the section they didn’t under-stand. They simply look for the question mark symbol and instantly see what they wanted to ask the teacher. If a teacher requests the author’s evidence for a stated claim, students can look for the “EV” notation. As they process data in a graph or a particular summarization structure, students can focus directly on the author’s essential arguments and supporting details. With up-to-date software, too, they can simply rearrange content according to their earlier notations, placing identified claims, for example, on the left side of a T-chart and evidence for each claim on the right side. With practice, they can arrange and rearrange different elements of critical analysis in such ways as to reveal patterns previously unseen and make new connections.

Students also may find it helpful to draw concepts that they read or expe-rience, rather than write, highlight, or underline them. One way to encourage nonlinear representation of learning is with sketchnotes, a strategy in which sketches, text, connectors, and lines are combined visually to summarize a concept. Many teachers have embraced this 21st century note-taking method in their classrooms. No matter how the doodles are put together, there is a flow to the drawings that the summarizer retains when he or she explains the drawings to others. That last step—students explaining the artistic portrayal



to others—is key. The Sketchnote Summaries strategy in Chapter 4 provides specific suggestions for using this approach.

Stress Scholarly Objectivity

Students should understand that a summary is a clear and undistorted distillation of a reading, lecture, or experience. Summaries are about the author’s arguments and details; they are not the place for the reader or partic-ipant’s personal opinions or judgments. If students need support in this effort at scholarly objectivity, teach them to preface their written and spoken sum-maries with the phrase “According to the author [or speaker or experience leader].” This strategy helps to keep them focused on what was truly in the text or experience and reminds them to form their interpretations and reac-tions separately. You can also ask them to fold a piece of paper horizontally across its center, creating a top half and a bottom half. Ask them to label the top “Summary” and the bottom “Commentary.” Whenever they want to write something opinionated or judging, they record it in the lower half, keeping the upper half for undistorted, factual summarization. It’s an analytical prac-tice that serves all scholars well.

Avoid Redundancies

We spend a lot of time asking students to elaborate, but it’s just as important to teach them how to be concise, and, wow, what a wonderful skill for summa-rizing! To start the journey toward cogency, ask students to collect examples of redundancy. For example, there’s no need for someone to describe a new-born cat as a “baby kitten,” because “kitten” includes the notion that the cat is young. In the phrase, “The army advanced forward,” the idea of forwardness is included in the meaning of the word “advanced,” inasmuch as advancing is not done backward. To be concise, then, the phrase should read, “The army advanced.” There are dozens of these redundant phrases in daily writing and speech:

“more additions”; “absolutely certain/essential/necessary”; “2:00 a.m. in the morning”; “blended together”; “brief moment”; “deliberate lie”; “for-eign imports”; “necessary requirement”; “old antique”; “orbiting satellite”; “preliminary draft”; “proceed ahead”; “raise up”; “refer back”; “repeat over”; “tiny particle”; “true facts”; “unexpected surprise”; “violent explosion”; “visible to the eye”; and “while at the same time.”



William Brohaugh’s wonderful book Write Tight (1993) has these exam-ples and more. In another effort to help new writers and summarizers “cut to the chase” in their writing, Brohaugh asks writers to practice turning inexact language into specific language or simply drop unnecessary modifiers. For example, “A small number of people” becomes “three people,” and “His whole speech bothered me” becomes “His speech bothered me.”

Rick’s students’ writing improved significantly after sharing Brohaugh’s insights with them. One unintended outcome, however, is that his students identified inexact and redundant statements in their other teachers’ classes. Empowered thus, they felt it was their duty to point out those statements to their teachers mid-lesson. It didn’t go over well with Rick’s colleagues, but Rick secretly smiles about it to this day.

Teach Students to Evaluate Their Summaries

Creating the initial summary is just the first step in the summarization pro-cess. We have to help them evaluate each rough draft summary, too. Consider using these mentoring questions to do this:

• Does it convey the information accurately?• Is it too narrow or too broad? Does it convey all of the important

elements? Does it convey too much?• Would someone else using this summary learn all he or she needed to

know to understand the subject?• Are the ideas in the right sequence?• Did I leave out my opinion and just report an undistorted essence of the

original content?• Did I use my own words and style?

Some of these are reconfirmed in the summarizing advice website https://www.summarizing.biz. The site’s authors declare four adjectives that best capture successful summaries (www.summarizing.biz/all-summarizing- strategies/), paraphrased as follows:

• Comprehensive. Ensure that your summary includes every helpful fact, all findings, and the author’s most salient ideas.

• Accurate. Ensure that your summary didn’t change the meaning; leave no room for misinterpretation.

• Neutral. Don’t include your point of view. Work to avoid personal comments and evaluations.



• Independent. Ensure that readers can understand your text without referring to the original source.

Emily Kissner (2006) has an excellent rubric for students and teacher to use when evaluating the success of a summary that includes the import-ant ideas from the text, accurately paraphrases the author’s words, deletes trivia and repeated information, collapses lists, and reflects the structure of the text (p. 25).

Stress to students that when they have finished deleting, selecting, and combining the salient information to include in their summaries, their sum-maries should be only 10 to 25 percent of the original material’s length (1 per-cent or less for a lengthy novel). If the summary is more than 25 percent of the original text’s length, they have not encapsulated enough. If many students are having difficulty paring down the information, it may be a sign that sum-marizing is not the proper way to handle that particular text. Be open to that possibility. Summarizing is one of thousands of ways to interact with mate-rial, not the only way.

Teaching Students to Paraphrase

First, let’s talk about plagiarism. In this “cut-and-paste” era, it is our obliga-tion not only to teach paraphrasing but also to provide students ample time to practice this skill so that they can feel confident when tasked with paraphras-ing throughout their educational careers. Multiple research studies have cited reasons for student plagiarism and cheating, however, such as fear of failure, grades and grade point average perceived as more important than learning, exhaustion, and ease of access. They also plagiarize and cheat because they lack some or all of the following:

• Real skills in citing the work of others.• Note-taking skills. Omitting quotation marks around verbatim

quotations (and later forgetting what was from the text and what was students’ own paraphrasing); poor paraphrasing skills; and confusion as to whether paraphrasing and summarizing others’ ideas is as strictly attributed as direct quotations.

• Executive function skills. Disorganization of content running through students’ still-developing minds, some of it pruned, and some of it elevated to prominence, but little of it maintaining its clear provenance.



Research from Middle Georgia State University, however, has confirmed that a large majority of unintentional plagiarism results from students’ strug-gle with. This reinforces what we know: teaching paraphrasing across content is essential. Think about creating opportunities in which your students dis-criminate between plagiarized and paraphrased material in class, before they do research. Students who can summarize and paraphrase with confidence have the tools necessary to avoid unintentional plagiarism (Plagiarism Pre-vention Guide, n.d.; Roig, 1999).

Plagiarism and our constructive response to it are not to be taken lightly. Rick writes about why students cheat and plagiarize and what we can do about it in the August 2017 issue of AMLE Magazine. (See full article at www .rickwormeli.com.) He notes that these issues exist not only with middle and high school students, but with university students as well, as observed by Associate Professor Michelle Navarre Cleary (2017) at DePaul University:

“. . . [A] student told me that when she is really focused on a project, her brain will become like a tape recorder—a week or two after reading sources, she’ll remember words verbatim, but she won’t remember whose words they are. She is not alone. A study of English university students reported that “It was considered [by the students] highly feasible for a phrase or sen-tence from a text to lodge in one’s subconscious and be reproduced word-for-word in an assignment . . . .”

. . . Some scholars of writing argue that students who abuse paraphrasing by simply inverting word order or changing word forms are just trying to digest new material . . . . Such “patchworking,” they say, is part of a long tra-dition of learning to write by copying more expert writers, imitating them as a way to begin processing and absorbing new content and skills . . . .”

Critical review of one’s own paraphrasing and idea use is key to ethical learn-ing and later professionalism. To fortify students in their non-plagiarizing, proper paraphrasing, and citation efforts, let’s teach our students the summa-rizing techniques described in this book, as well as:

• Teach proper note-taking strategies and how to keep track of quotations, gathered information, and citations.

• Help students analyze samples of students’ work that have and have not been plagiarized. Talk about your feelings as you discover the cheating in students’ work, and how they would feel if some of their cultural and sports heroes cheated in their fields. This will help them reflect on their own behavior as they prepare their assignments.



• Use multiple assessments in varied formats, not just one, to determine a student’s true proficiency. It’s far more difficult to cheat across multiple formats and on multiple occasions. The larger pattern of evidence over time and formats yields more accurate reports of student competence.

• Outline the class and school rules on cheating and plagiarism clearly. Describe the consequences for such infractions in vivid terms. In addition, when students plagiarize due to lack of maturity or the skills mentioned above, let’s make it possible for them to recover academic and personal standing in full, rather than receive a permanent, unrecoverable zero in the subject being taught. There’s hope here.

• And perhaps most importantly, let’s teach students how to paraphrase correctly—an influential skill.

Paraphrasing

“But the author already said it the best way,” your student complains. “How am I supposed to use different words? Isn’t that a waste of time when some-one else already figured it out?”

Most of us have heard those sentiments from our students. There are still others who transcribe text almost verbatim, changing only one or two words but claiming the entirety is their own thinking. This is unintentional plagia-rism, and we want to teach students to (1) respect the intellectual property of others, (2) avoid claiming others’ work as their own, and (3) avoid the devas-tating blow to personal reputation and credibility that comes with the expo-sure of such lying.

As many of us know, summarizing is “big picture” in nature, reformatting text, experience, and content from a wider camera lens and condensing it into another format, making sure to include elements critical to understand-ing the whole. Paraphrasing is on a smaller scale and more focused on simply restating what’s there. The authors at www.summarizing.biz/summarizing- vs-paraphrasing/ describe it thus:

. . . when you’re paraphrasing, you’re going piece by piece. For instance, maybe you want to paraphrase an article that discusses the merits of vam-pires vs. werewolves. With paraphrasing, you would go through and rephrase each sentence or paragraph, depending on how long the piece is. By contrast, with a summary, you’ll read the entire thing and then produce an entirely



new piece. The order, the structure, and the writing style will probably be totally different.

Let’s look at some of the ways to help students meet the challenges that paraphrasing presents.

Paraphrasing Tip 1: Vocabulary DevelopmentOne reason that students struggle with paraphrasing is that they lack the

extended exposure to synonyms and language usage that adults have. It’s eas-ier for adults to paraphrase someone else’s words because adults have a larger vocabulary and more experience with different kinds of sentence structures. Teachers should understand why students panic when they are asked to para-phrase without plagiarizing.

Let’s help students paraphrase by helping them increase the size and use of their vocabulary. Make vocabulary terms and their synonyms a part of every-day language practice in your classroom. Use the new vocabulary words—large and small—in everyday discussions. Immerse students in the terms; make such use seem natural. All teachers—yes, even high school teachers —can post word walls or word banks in their classrooms, as suggested previ-ously, and use them daily in conversations in order to increase the prevalence of the words. When students hear such words daily, they are more likely to use them.

We internalize vocabulary that we hear and say repeatedly. Something that is internalized tends to be readily accessible, in the “front” of our minds. We don’t have to use a reference book. When we mentally store such words and concepts, our thinking about concepts on a page becomes more flexible. We easily find substitutions and ways to generalize specific facts; we play with language to fit our needs.

One particular set of vocabulary words is crucial for writing summaries: transition words. Some students can’t write summaries because they can’t string together words and thoughts coherently. All they need to be successful are the right transition words—a way to get from one idea to the next. Here is a sample set of transition terms and phrases to stress: “such as”; “again”; “also”; “as”; “as a result”; “as well as”; “because”; “before”; “between”; “but”; “during”; “even though”; “finally”; “first”; “for example”; “for this reason”; “however”; “if”; “immediately”; “in the same way”; “next”; “on the one hand” and “on the other hand”; “then”; “therefore”; “throughout”; “while”; and “yet.”



Paraphrasing Tip 2: Synonym Substitution and Condensing (Appositives, Subordinate Clauses, Conjunctions, and Participles)

Most people take one of two basic approaches when paraphrasing: (1) sub-stituting synonyms for existing words, or (2) combining sentences and ideas that were originally presented in multiple sentences. Give your students ample time to practice these two approaches. To build their fluency with para-phrasing, for example, have them list synonyms for existing words, using both new vocabulary and common words: “millipedes” can become bugs, “NaCl” becomes “salt,” “skeleton” becomes “bones” or “bone structure.” Spend time brainstorming three or four ways to restate the same thing: “loving” can be “compassionate,” “caring,” “heartwarming,” and “affectionate.” Introduce them to their new best friend: a thesaurus! In Dedra’s English classroom, she created a “writer’s wall” that evolved with new words throughout the course of the year. When students (or the teacher) encountered overused or com-mon words, someone would add the word and three alternatives to the wall. During work time, students could be seen searching the wall to find a new word to replace an overused word in their summaries and rewrites.

A word of caution here, however: the prudent paraphraser goes through the text and identifies words that are so key to capturing text gist that syn-onyms are not appropriate. If we were paraphrasing text about the mak-ing of paper, for example, we’d keep the word “paper” in the paraphrasing. If we were summarizing a movie about Nelson Mandela, we wouldn’t try to find multiple ways to refer to him as “that President of the African National Congress” or “that prisoner of 27 years who got out and became President of South Africa.” We’d keep “Nelson Mandela” in the paraphrasing; if the name were repeated, we could use “Mr. Mandela.”

Sentence play is important, but students need the tools and their prac-tice. To start, give students practice combining two longer sentences into one shorter version that captures the gist of both. Here’s an example:

Original text:

Adult giant squid can grow to 60 feet long. They have eyes the size of hubcaps, and some of their neurons are so large they can be seen with the naked eye.

Paraphrased text:

Because giant squid can be as long as a bus, every part of them is unusu-ally huge.



To cultivate the verbal agility necessary here, ask students to practice with appositives, subordinate clauses, conjunctions, and participles. The practice creates a command of paraphrasing language that quickly becomes second nature. Let’s take a look at the combining and recombining skills we want students to develop. “Because her classmates teased her, Sheila kept to her-self and said nothing” is a little different from “Sheila kept to herself and said nothing because her classmates teased her.” Which way we write the sentence depends on what we want to emphasize. “Because they shared electron pairs, the atoms had a covalent bond” is more efficient than using two separate sen-tences, one describing the electron pairs and one describing covalent bonds. “Winston Churchill, the prime minister of England, had positive relation-ships with both Presidents Roosevelt (FDR) and Truman, which strength-ened the Allied efforts” concisely incorporates multiple facts from an article on the topic.

Students don’t naturally see these possibilities until we teach them about appositives (pronouns, nouns, or phrases that rename or clarify a noun or pronoun and are set off by commas), conjunctions (a word that joins words or phrases, such as “and”; “but”; “although”; “or”; “not”; “yet”; “for”; and “so”), and participles (a verb being used as an adjective or a noun, such as “crouch-ing” in “the crouching tiger”; “vetting” in “vetting politicians and their back-grounds is vital to today’s elections”; and “functioning” in “functioning as carriers of amino acids, transfer RNA participates in protein synthesis and other reactions not related to ribosomes” (paraphrased from www.nobelprize .org). Once we teach these three tools, we ask students to regroup sentences into more condensed versions as often as possible:

• “Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the most iconic artists of American Modernism, was known for dramatic depictions of flowers, landscapes, and, ‘bones against the stark desert sky.’” (paraphrased from www.okeeffemuseum.org/about-georgia-okeeffe/)

• “Captain Lewis allowed his men to make important decisions in a democratic manner” and “This democratic attitude fostered a spirit of togetherness and commitment on the part of Lewis’s fellow explorers” become “Allowing his men to make important decisions in a democratic manner, Lewis fostered a spirit of togetherness and commitment among his fellow explorers.” (From http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/combining_skills.htm.)

These quick synonym generators and sentence encapsulations aren’t something students should do a few times in September and then never do



again until April. The human brain prunes away unused skills, especially during the middle and high school years. If we want students to remain skilled in paraphrasing and summarizing, they must practice these strategies throughout the year, keeping the necessary neural networks accessible and well connected.

Paraphrasing Tip 3: Providing ModelsAnother strategy to help students with paraphrasing is to give them sev-

eral examples of successful paraphrasing and let them copy the structure into their own work. Some teachers, however, may argue, “If students copy the model exactly, they’ll never learn to think for themselves. They’ll never be able to handle all situations that way, only the situations that are similar to the model.”

This belief is a common fallacy about writing and summarizing. The truth is that we eventually outgrow our models, whether they are models of writ-ing, art, performance, or paraphrasing. Give your students plentiful models of original text with paraphrasing and allow them to practice those structures on new text. Appendix A has examples of original text with its paraphrasing to get you started.

Paraphrasing Tip 4: The Headline StrategyYet another strategy for teaching paraphrasing is to have students take

any concept, event, or person and turn the example into a newspaper head-line. Although they’re often used only to hook readers’ interest, headlines must capture the essence of the story in one line. To illustrate, an original text presenting a detailed explanation of photosynthesis might yield the head-line “Light and Chlorophyll Combine to Make Sugar and Oxygen.” A detailed explanation of how to divide fractions might become “In Dividing, Second Fraction Does a Flip for Multiplying!” Extended practice in creating news headlines will help students develop a paraphrasing mind-set. Although the actual headline may be a helpful mnemonic for long-term retention, the cre-ation of a line to accurately and completely portray the concepts, events, or people is what results in solid learning.

The headline activity should include three parts: the headline creation itself, the reasoning for the headline choice, and student critiquing. Students should include the reasoning for the headline choice as evidence or justifica-tion. This step will help to clarify and explain thinking as the critiquing step is completed. Students critiquing each other’s headlines in view of their learn-ing will also help them retain information. By the way, it would be helpful to



invite a newspaper editor to visit your class and talk about how headlines are created and how reporters get to the gist of stories.

Students familiar with Twitter can make hashtags instead of newspaper headlines by using the same three-step process: #antecedentcomesbefore, #rate=distance/time, #cubismrepresentsnatureingeometrics.

Paraphrasing Tip 5: Pulling Back the Camera LensConsider the poem “The New Colossus,” written by Emma Lazarus and

engraved on a bronze plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor in 1903:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,With conquering limbs astride from land to land;Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall standA mighty woman with a torch, whose flameIs the imprisoned lightning, and her nameMother of Exiles. From her beacon-handGlows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes commandThe air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries sheWith silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

When reading it the first time, a student may conjure a warrior woman, hold-ing a large torch, protecting those who come into her domain. There’s great imagery here, such as “imprisoned lightning,” “conquering limbs astride from land to land,” and “wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Students trying to paraphrase get caught up in the literal scene as depicted. Some imagine the panels of a graphic novel portraying the moment.

In viewing the larger context, however, students see the phrases and the entire scene against the backdrop of history and politics, and in particular, what was happening with immigration in the United States at the turn of the century. They begin to see the poem as a distillation of America’s essence, from the first explorers and pilgrims up through today’s refugees seeking asylum. In turn, that helps them with a greater perspective, and they wonder at America’s identity today. Do we still welcome huddled masses yearning to breathe free? Do we still invite the homeless and tempest-tossed through our golden door? If not, what has changed in us? How do we want to be known?



What is the lawful and compassionate response to all the families here in our country illegally? How do we reconcile the idea of America with the reality of America? And how does our perspective change when we wrestle with what we did to the Native Americans and First Nations peoples who were here before us?

In a compelling version of this, Jeff Wilhelm (2013) reminds us of perhaps the most important element to successful summarization and personal pro-cessing: the connections among supportive details, their main idea, and what it means for applications beyond the text. He writes

Main ideas can be directly stated, which typically happens in informa-tional text and arguments. They can also be simply implied by the patterns of key details, which is usually the case with literature. For readers, the challenge—and the joy—is to connect the dots of these patterns in order to discern what the author is saying about life. For example, to understand what Lois Lowry is saying about the topic of protecting civil rights in Number the Stars, we must look at the pattern of what the Danes—and in particular, the Johansens—did to protect their Jewish neighbors during World War II. We must then look at what the Jewish population did to help themselves. And finally, we must consider which actions worked and which did not. Only see-ing across the patterns of these details can we understand the point Lowry makes about the topic of protecting civil rights (i.e., that we must work together as an entire community to define and protect these rights). (p. 108)

Wilhelm’s insights on teaching theme, main idea, and supportive details in complex text by first asking students to analyze main idea and supporting ele-ments in collages and famous artworks are very compelling. In today’s graph-ically oriented society, this strategy is highly effective in engaging students and teaching such useful skill sets.

At this point, some readers may be concerned that this is moving from simple paraphrasing into interpretation and meaning-making. We agree, but remember that we paraphrase best what we understand and find meaningful. It’s easier to make connections, to see how one thing is the subset/superset/cause/effect/correlation of another when it’s meaningful. We’re able to col-lapse lists (Kissner, 2006) of items, concepts, or any series in text readily and accurately, and we can find vocabulary in the larger topic to substitute for the text that the narrow focus didn’t provide.

In another example, the students summarize a math problem by simply retelling the steps used to solve it. When we help them see the larger con-text, however, one of them makes a significant connection: “I can follow the logic of the problem’s solution much better when I see the math properties



it’s using.” Later, when trying to solve a problem in science that requires the use of same mathematics, this student is more flexible and assured for recog-nizing the math properties at work.

This kind of dexterity requires topical understanding and meaning. When both are present, students have more control over the expression of their understanding (i.e., paraphrasing what others have said or performed). To assist students, then, let’s help them always seek the larger context in what they are paraphrasing, as if pulling back more of a curtain to reveal the painted artistry.

To get this idea across visually, consider using the books Zoom (1995) and Re-Zoom (1998) by Istvan Banyai, in which, on each page, the scene is a wider view of the scene on the preceding page, which changes our perception of what’s happening in the story. In case you’re interested, a video portrayals of these stories are available at https://youtu.be/sTww-fCuc7Y and https:// youtu.be/S1VGjE_V51o.

In the poem “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” by John Godfrey Saxe, six blind men touch the same elephant at six different points on its body and, as a result, come away with six very different interpretations of what an ele-phant is; each interpretation is accurate for the portion touched but inaccu-rate in the overall truth of what an elephant is. If each man had experienced the other elements experienced by all the other men, then each would have an accurate perception. This poem (told and visualized at https://youtu.be/bJVBQefNXIw) may help students appreciate the need to look for the larger picture in order to paraphrase thoughtfully.

Paraphrasing Tip 6: Active ListeningAnother way to open the world of paraphrasing for your students is to use

active-listening lessons that are part of conflict resolution training. When we listen to people with whom we have conflicts, we must understand their points before forming our response. One of the most effective starting lines is for the listener to respond, “So what you’re saying is . . . .” This strategy forces us to encapsulate the message with the clear intent of getting it right. Here are some other good openers:

• So what I’m hearing is . . . .• The bottom line, then, seems to be . . . .• Let me make sure I have this right. You’re saying that . . . .

When it’s time to teach paraphrasing in a research unit, ask your stu-dents to first role-play the mediation of minor conflicts or use a starter line to

“The Blind Men and

the Elephant”

Zoom

Re-Zoom



summarize or paraphrase what the other person said. After practice sessions, apply similar starting lines to sample text passages:

• So what the author is saying is . . . .• In other words, . . . .• The gist of it is . . . . ”

When students practice aloud, as they do with role-playing, they create a mind-set for a useful written summarization.

Paraphrasing Tip 7: Paraphrase Incorrectly and Note the Effect

Show students how easy it is to paraphrase something incorrectly and why making such errors is frustrating for everyone involved. Repeated evalu-ation of paraphrasings—done well or done poorly—will help students critique their own work while it’s in progress, not just after it’s done. Show examples of paraphrasings that distort the text’s original meaning and thereby lead to misinformation, poor learning, wasted time, and damage to the paraphraser’s reputation. Appendix A includes sample paraphrasings with various degrees of accuracy or distortion. Asking your students to analyze these kinds of sam-ples can help them see the importance of paraphrasing accurately. It can also motivate them to confirm their interpretations with others, which is a valu-able practice for all of us.

Conclusion

Sometimes I think Nike® has it right: we find success when we find the cour-age to “just do it.” Summarization is a scholarly skill, but it’s not exclusive to scholars; all of us can do it if we’re taught the varied forms and given repeated practice and feedback. Sometimes our students struggle a bit, but with each new attempt, they get a little closer to attaining the gift of summarization proficiency. That knowledge primes students’ brains, expands comprehen-sion, and helps students process and retain information for longer than next week’s quiz, especially if they practice it repeatedly throughout the year and keep those neural pathways open.

Summarization itself helps students process content and skills and, in doing so, provides an excellent form of assessment for both the student and the teacher. Consider summarization strategies, then, as a huge reservoir of formative and summative assessment prompts.



As teachers, we can find ways to make it worth students’ while to take posi-tive risks with summarizing. Learning summarizing strategies may be daunt-ing at first, but the payoff is great. As Igor Stravinsky said, “I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.” Serving as both a mirror and a sieve, summarization enables students to freely explore ideas and analyze them. It can improve student learning and increase student success in all grade levels and all disciplines. And, as we’re about to explore, it can even be a lot of fun.


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About the Authors



Rick Wormeli, one of the first National Board–certified teachers in America, brings innovation, energy, validity, and high standards to both his presentations and his instruc-tional practice, which includes 38 years of teaching math, science, English, physical education, health, and history and of coaching teachers and principals. Rick’s work has been reported in numerous media, including ABC’s Good Morning America, MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews,

National Geographic and Good Housekeeping magazines, What Matters Most: Teaching for the 21st Century, and The Washington Post. He is a columnist for AMLE Magazine and a frequent contributor to ASCD’s Education Lead-ership magazine. His classroom practice is one of the showcases for ASCD’s best-selling series, “At Work in the Differentiated Classroom.”

With his substantive presentations, sense of humor, and unconventional approaches, Rick has been asked to present to teachers and administrators in all 50 states, Canada, China, Europe, Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Austra-lia, and the Middle East as well as at the White House. He is a seasoned veteran of many international webcasts and he is Disney’s American Teacher Awards 1996 Outstanding English Teacher of the Nation. He received the 2008 Distin-guished Service Award from the New England League of Middle Schools for Teaching Excellence, Service, and Leadership, and he has been a consultant for National Public Radio, USA Today, Court TV (now TruTV), and the Smithso-nian Institution’s Natural Partners Program and their hunt for the giant squid.

Dedra Stafford is an educational consultant, speaker, trainer, and author. Her work has led her to speak in three international schools and more than 40 states. Much of Dedra’s time is spent supporting high-risk schools in an embedded capacity. A passionate educator with a belief in the power of positive purposeful teaching, her goal is to play a small part in helping educators find and maintain their joy for education while gaining new strategies and skills

to reach today’s learners. With more than 20 years in education as a former middle school teacher and district professional development specialist work-ing with preschool through 12th grade teachers and administrators, Dedra understands the need for practical research-based strategies that can be implemented immediately in the classroom. Dedra is the author of Podcast-ing: A Step-by-Step Guide for Creating Podcasts and Using Them in the Class-room and coauthor of the best-selling book Teaching Kids to Thrive: The Other Essential Skills for Success.


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