Twenty Years of Summarizing

 When I sat down to write my first book, Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling: Skills for Better Reading, Writing, and Test Taking, my main goal was to settle a professional dispute that I had with a colleague: Was summarizing a lower level skill? Was it worthy of teaching, in and of itself? Not only did I settle the dispute, but I also entered a new to me world of educational research and discussion.

    Twenty years and 8 classrooms later, arguments about summarizing persist. Now, though, the entire educational landscape has shifted. The Common Core Standards de-emphasized comprehension skills like summarizing, putting a greater importance on textual analysis. Misguided application of Science of Reading has gutted comprehension instruction completely for some students, leading second graders to mark up words that they know how to read to identify syllable types while reading only tortured text written with a narrow vocabulary of decodable words. And in the background, AI is quietly summarizing every text that has ever been written, right down to the product review for this very product. It’s enough to make one wonder if a revised version of this product is even worth creating.

My own educational landscape has shifted, too. When I first opened up journal articles to find out about summarizing, I was teaching in a district that afforded me a great amount of professional leeway. Over the years, that leeway narrowed until my last year of ELA teaching was constrained by keeping pace and teaching only what was in the purchased textbook curriculum.

But.

Last year, I sat down to work with students in my new position, gifted and enrichment. And I found that my students, students with high reading scores and well-developed vocabularies and amazing background knoweldge, these students who had everything going for them, could not paraphrase a text to answer a question. And these students also could not tell me what a summary is, much less how to write one.

“I wonder how I can help them?” I mused, and did some cursory Internet searching (boy, has that changed! Where I used to find a hundred helpful blog posts, now I find only links to products!). Several pages in, I stumbled upon something that I had written. 

Because of course I know how to teach summarizing. Of course I know that I have to teach students how to find main ideas, how to differentiate what the author finds important from what they as the reader find important, how to restructure ideas to paraphrase, how to eliminate trivial details from a summary. Of course I know how to do this!

It was with new energy that I started the complete overhaul of this product. I could envision what I wanted: A pretest. Multiple text sets with best practice summarizing activities. Multiple levels and interesting topics that I could use with all of my classes in grades 3-6. I had been discouraged from writing for a long time—discouraged by value-added test scores, discouraged by a prescriptive curriculum, discouraged by all that is going on in education beyond my classroom. But when it comes to summarizing, I felt as if I was once more on solid ground.

After all—I wrote the book.