Chapter #11: Summarizing and Synthesizing Information- The Evolution of Thought

The biggest things that I took from this chapter regards teaching students to be analytical in what they need to accomplish in their reading and writing about the text.  At my age, I am able to do this to a degree, but I feel that explicit instruction could have made me a better reader and subsequent writer.  I was never taught to examine my text and look for clues about how I should read the text.  While told that there are different texts, it was never made very clear to me how I should arrange my thoughts for properly processing different works. 

I feel that many of these strategies would be very helpful to students.  Harvey & Goodvis said, “When we summarize information during reading, we pull out the most important information and put it in our own words to remember it.  Each bit of information we encounter adds a piece to the construction of meaning.”  As educators, we need to better prime our students to go into an assignment prepared to read in a way that will allow them to pull the most necessary information from the text.  If I work with older students, I would love to spend time presenting these strategies, and giving students the opportunity to put those strategies to use with each kind of text.  I would also like to give them a chance to discern how they should read different texts.  These skills would most certainly serve them throughout their learning careers, giving them the tools to attack a text and get the most out of it.  

As a Kindergarten teacher I can begin to help my students to achieve these skills by reading picture books and modeling how to write a short summary. Students can learn to write their own summaries by jotting down a few words during/after reading and then using those words to construct their own summary. The teacher in the text provided the following tips to help early readers summarize:

1. Remember to tell what is important
2. Tell it in a way that makes sense
3. Try not to tell too much