Student-Centered Strategies: Summarizing and Note Taking

At Lincoln School, we are committed to the creation of student-centered learning environments that focus not just on rigorous academic concepts and content, but also the development of an academic skillset that will support student learning now and in the future. As a part of our faculty’s work this year to identify and strengthen student-centered instructional teaching and learning, we will spend November learning about and implementing strategies and activities to support students’ use of summarizing and note taking skills.

Why summarizing strategies? Simply put, summarizing skills are foundational to how almost everyone learns (I actually think all, but I’m wary of the few outliers who prove the rule). When we take in new information, we make sense of it by reframing it within the context of our own viewpoints and understandings. We “put it in our own words” and in doing so condense the learning into understandable bits of information that we can easily understand, recall, and reframe as we need. This is what summarizing is all about.

Robert Marzano dedicated the third chapter of his book Classroom Instruction That Works, to summarizing and note-taking. In it, he writes about the importance of teaching these skills and strategies to students and the impact they have on student learning as measured in various educational studies. According to Marzano, summarizing requires students to analyze information on a “deep level” and that, in doing so, students gain a conceptual understanding that is uniquely relevant to them. He provides various strategies that can be explicitly taught to students to facilitate their learning of the skill and he uses further research to support this as an educational approach. During the month of November, our Lincoln teachers will be learning these and other summarizing strategies and implementing them in our classrooms with students. We’ll be talking with students about what we’re doing and why, and we’ll be debriefing our experiences to gain a better understanding of what’s working with our students and how to perpetuate those successes in the future.

We’ll also be focusing on note taking strategies with our students. Note taking is an interesting learning skill, because it’s something we generally expect of our learners but it’s not something we often take the time to directly teach. This month we will. We’ll focus on a few specific note taking strategies like Cornell Notes, outlines, and Picture Notes, and we’ll also leave room for teachers and students to bring other strategies to the table. Again, we’ll do this work directly with students and behind the scenes in our faculty and department meetings in order to develop an ongoing “toolkit” to use with Lincoln students.

The hope is that, in addition to being effective learning/teaching strategies, these activities are also engaging for our students. A few of the activities we’ll sample during our introductory PD session include:

• Bumper Stickers: Draw/write a bumper sticker summarizing the theme, main idea, or a key detail of your learning. Be sure to include an illustration (image) and a short phrase (words).
• Into the Inter-webs: Design a website landing-page that summarizes the main ideas and/or key details of your learning. Include catchy titles and brief descriptions, as well as images, etc.
• One-sentence summaries: Summarize your learning in one sentence.
• 6-word memoirs: Summarize your learning in 6 words. This is based on a classic writing exercise
• Story Boards: Create a storyboard (cartoon) that summarizes your learning. Include illustrations and brief text.
• Do as I Say, Not as I Do: Find a partner and decide who will lead and who will follow. The leader decides what theme, main idea, or key detail(s) should be included in the group’s product (directions, text, illustration). Finally, the leader tells the follower on what to write or draw. Basically, the director may use their voice but not their hands, while the follower may use their hands but not their voice.

None of these are new; they’ve all been passed down, borrowed, modified, or otherwise absconded. That’s the thing about coming up with engaging activities for learning…it’s often best done with an eye towards the “real world” and a tongue placed firmly in cheek. We’ll share the above and call upon our faculty to contribute others and we build our toolkit together.