My Students Can’t Summarize! Please Help!

The ability to read and summarize a text is an essential skill. A good summary needs to do more than pick out the big ideas and simplify the text. A good summary helps students to identify and analyze key points in the text and then relate those points to the overall structure of the text. This session explores a powerful method of summarizing text; summarization that is linked to text-structure improves both the quality of the written summaries and students’ overall comprehension of the text. Teachers will walk away with examples, graphic organizers, and classroom materials.