Monday, January 6, 2014

Summarizing

Summarizing is a complex task that we often ask our students to perform in order to demonstrate their understanding.  As I was reading Reading for Understanding  today, I came across this nugget:
"To summarize well, students must first comprehend what they have read and then make decisions about what is important and not so important in a text and what kinds of relationships have been represented."
While reading this, it struck me that I have given little thought to what I am truly asking from my students when I require summarizing.  I do think they have the ability to summarize but I wonder what kind of instruction and modeling would be helpful to support them in making well crafted summaries.

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