Summarizing, Paraphrasing, Retelling

Emily Kissner's book, unfortunately, is part of my great unread. One of these days...

Still, I've read enough of it to recommend it.

The introduction & second chapters are online:

I started teaching language arts at the height of the whole language movement. The supervisor in my district had removed the old scope and sequence, drill and kill–based curriculum in favor of a far more open curriculum that allowed teachers to plan their own lessons and make their own judgments. “But I have no judgment!” I remember wailing to my mother, also a teacher. [note: this is exactly the way I felt when I first had kids and read advice books telling me to "trust my instincts": I didn't have any instincts] “How do you think I learned what to do?” she asked, and showed me her bookshelf, which was covered with stacks and stacks of professional books. I got the message. I couldn’t expect to make it through a career of teaching with only the knowledge I had picked up in a handful of undergraduate courses. If I was going to be successful, I needed to read. And read. And read.

During the next few years, I amassed my own collection of books. When I came to a thorny patch in my instruction—for example, how to get students to apply grammar skills to their writing—I would look through the books for ideas and solutions. If I didn’t find the answer in my own books, I would borrow from my mother’s bookshelf or the reading specialist’s....

This helped me to cope with the changes that swept through my classroom during the course of the next seven years. I started teaching seventh grade writing, then added sixth grade writing to the mix. When Integrated Language Arts came to our school a few years later, I was thrilled to be able to teach a ninety-minute block of reading and writing. Our state outcomes became content standards, our state testing program was transformed from performance-based assessment to “selected response,” or multiple choice, and the district middle school reading and writing department was headed by three different supervisors who dispersed three different curriculum manuals. As if these changes were not enough, I uprooted myself after seven years and went to teach a self-contained sixth grade class in a tiny rural district. Moving from a district with 28,000 students to a district with 1,800 was quite a culture shock.....

The more things changed, the more I could see how some things remained the same. Whether I was teaching to outcomes or standards, whether my curriculum was organized according to theme or genre, whether I had a classroom with windows, I faced young adolescents every day. All the books in the world cannot prepare a teacher for what happens once the students walk into the room.

I certainly wasn’t prepared to teach summarizing. Included as a content standard and an assessment anchor, I knew that summarizing was important, and I dutifully tried to help my sixth and seventh graders write summaries of both fiction and nonfiction texts. I envisioned smoothly written short pieces, like those in TV Guide, that would elegantly capture the essence of a text with a minimum of words.

What I got were stacks of bizarre constructions that claimed to be summaries—or “sumeries,” as my students often wrote—that either copied whole sentences of text, focused on just one section, or missed the main points altogether. Sometimes I wondered if the students had read the same text that I had. The more able students could occasionally pull together a coherent comment or two, but often they would try to jam a summary into the traditional paragraph template—topic sentence, supporting details, concluding sentence.

I learned many things from the article. How tomb robbers took things from tombs, what they stole from tombs, and what they were like. It was a great article.

I wasn’t sure of how to help them. My usual comments—“Elaborate. Add more. Give more detail”—are not helpful for summarizing. The students thought I had become temporarily insane when I told them, “That’s too long. Make it short. Are those details necessary?”

Standing in front of the classroom with a student summary on the overhead projector, I struggled to explain to the students why it was not effective.

“But the article is about trees, right?” Patrick asked from the front row. “So why can’t I say, ‘This article is about trees?’”

I floundered. As the teacher, I was supposed to know these things!

“It’s not good writing,” I said, finally.

“It sounds good to me,” Patrick said, to a chorus of agreement from elsewhere in the room. “I think it’s fine.”

Chapter 2 is droll:

The scene was grim. Eight of us were packed into a cramped, unair-conditioned room, spending the first week of our summer in a kind of curricular sweatshop. Our task was daunting: to unite the previously divided middle school reading and writing programs into one cohesive class. And write 100 days of curriculum in one week, using enough detail so that reading teachers could confidently teach the writing components and writing teachers could teach the reading. The sixth grade table had rapidly devolved into a bizarre reading–writing turf war.

“I don’t think retelling is something we want to assess in middle school,” a reading specialist said. “I mean, just being able to spit back^* the characters and plot of a story doesn’t show any higher level thinking.” To those of us who had taught writing, she said, patronizingly, “One of the goals of teaching reading is to get kids to think critically.”

Really.

“Are you talking about retelling or summarizing?” asked a veteran teacher.

“Aren’t they both the same thing?” someone else asked. [shoot me]

“If we include retelling—or summarizing—would it be a reading activity or a writing activity?”

“How would we assess it?”

“Well,” said one teacher, who came from the more affluent part of the district, “I don’t think summarizing is a skill that we should have to teach in middle school. It’s time that we stop babying students and expect them to use what they learned in elementary school.”^**

“Or should have learned,” someone else chimed in. Reading teachers and writing teachers united momentarily to agree that students should have already learned basically everything before arriving in middle school.

I’ve found that there’s no way to win one of these arguments. [ditto!] In this case, nothing I could have said would have convinced any of these teachers that they were wrong. (Despite the fact that I was the only one who had actually taught reading and writing together, I was still considered a “writing” teacher, and therefore unable to comprehend reading issues!) This group perpetuated four pervasive myths about the related skills of summarizing, paraphrasing, and retelling.

what is a summary, anyway?

If paraphrasing is just restating ideas, and a retelling is completely oral, what is a summary? This question has plagued researchers—and students— for years. Definitions for a summary abound. It may be most useful to study some of the important characteristics of a summary. Although there are some issues still up for debate, most people agree on the following points.

A summary should be shorter than the original text. How much shorter? It depends. A fifteen-page article could be summarized in one page, two pages, or even a single paragraph, depending on the purpose of the summary and the needs of the audience. A summary should include the main ideas of the text. Although this sounds easy enough, it’s where most students, and most adults, have trouble. Stating the main ideas of a text is easy when the author comes out and states them. The task becomes much more difficult when the main ideas are implicit, or unstated, as is usually the case in fiction.

A summary should reflect the structure and order of the original text. This can become another stumbling block. Fiction text written in chronological order is easiest for students to summarize. When it comes to nonfiction, however, authors use a variety of structures. Most students are used to the form of text that states a main point and then supports that point with details. (That’s the structure I’ve used in most of this book.) However, if a text is written in compareand- contrast order, the summary should follow suit.

A summary should include important details. “But how do I know which details are important?” students ask, and research shows that adolescents don’t always agree with adults on the importance of specific ideas (Garner et al. 1989). But summaries do need to include the details that support an author’s main points. A summary, therefore, is a shortened version of an original text, stating the main ideas and important details of the text with the same text structure and order of the original. It had taken me time, but I could finally lay the myths of summarizing to rest. I knew what summarizing was, how paraphrasing was completely different, and why a retelling and a summary could never be confused. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn these things in time for curriculum writing.

The argument at the sixth grade table evaporated as our supervisor came over. “Everything going well?” he asked, and all at the table smiled and nodded.

“You know,” said the reading specialist, after he left, “we only have to write 100 days worth of lessons. We could always leave it up to the individual teachers whether or not to teach summarizing.”

Another teacher nodded. “That way, those of us with—uh, more advanced kids—can move on to lessons that will really benefit them.” She looked pointedly at me.

“Besides,” someone else said, “if we were going to have summarizing tasks, we’d need to have anchor papers, rubrics, assessments—it’s just too much work.”

And there you have it: a window onto the world of our public schools, where educators decide not to teach the stuff they agree kids have to know because somebody else already should have taught it.

Not my problem.

I had never thought about summaries reflecting the structure of the original text.

I find that interesting, helpful, and intriguing.


^* Which is better? spit or regurgitate?

^** Note: this teacher comes from "the more affluent part of the district."