Make information stick with magnet summaries

It's amazing how much useful information one can retrieve from one session at a conference!  This week's blog stems from the same session from the IRC 2014 Conference as the last two I have written.  The strategy is magnet summaries, which also happens to be a CRISS strategy. Double score!

Magnet summaries can be used in a variety of contexts, which is what I love about the strategies in the Project CRISS manual.  They're all very adaptable.  Here's how this one works:

•  Give each student an index card or half sheet of paper.  On the "front" have the students write the topic you want them to summarize.  For example, if you're teaching students about variables in math, write variables on the front of the card.  
• After the initial lesson, have students go back to their notes (maybe do this in partners to keep your interpersonals happy) and find four words that stick out as being key words connecting to the word in the middle (one or more will probably be another vocabulary word, which should help with information transfer).  When talking about variables in math, you might have words like constant, coefficient, operator, and equation.  

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• On the back of the card, students can expand their words into sentences.  Depending on the writers, you may choose to let them freely write their summary based upon the five words on the front of it, OR you may want to give your students a frame.  The frame might look something like this:

Today's lesson explains [topic] by talking about ______, ______, ______, and ______.  [Write one sentence explaining each of the four magnet words or combine them into a few sentences if they easily connect.] It is important to know this because ___________________. 

The picture to the right is one way a student could write a magnet summary if you were allowing them some freedom in their writing or if you have very comfortable writers.  One thing that I liked about the session I attended at the IRC Conference is their attention to reflection, which is not included in the example above.  The last sentence in the frame above in red addresses the reflection.  Students need to justify why the information is important.  This does two things - it validates why the information is being taught and creates a reason to connect the information to either new information, past information, or student's lives.  

So think about the next lesson you plan to share with your students.  How can this strategy be adapted?  Could you add it easily?  Could you use it as a formative assessment?  Share your ideas with us in the comments below.  

One summarizing strategy EVERYBODY can use

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Writing in the content areas - a new buzz phrase in the field of education. Some content area teachers embrace it as a great challenge to overcome while others duck tail and run the other way.  Regardless, research states clearly that if you can write about it, you can process through it and display mastery of it.  Plus, writing about certain things actually helps one to reflect on the process of whatever skill he is mastering.

I've had some interesting discussions about writing with teachers over the years, and what I have found is that our content area teachers outside of the language arts department may avoid writing for a variety of reasons. Below is a list of those reasons, and my responses to each one (in purple).

• It's uncomfortable for me. It's not my expertise, and I don't have a clue how to teach it.
• This is valid.  If somebody were to ask me to teach math, I would be uncomfortable also because teaching math is not my area of expertise.  As a veteran teacher I would ask for some support from the experts.  Know that, first off, you ARE the expert in your content area, and you are the expert in reading your subject - you just don't realize it because you're so good at it!  You are probably the expert in writing in your field, also.  No language arts teacher is going to be as knowledgeable in writing in your content area as you are because language arts teachers are the experts in writing for literature.  But ask one for some guidance if you don't feel perfectly at ease.  Ask other experts in the building (your department chair or literacy specialist).  Ask an administrator for suggestions.  Everything new is uncomfortable, but if you give it a shot it won't be new forever.  
• Formal writing takes too much time.
• Writing does not have to be a formal practice.  It could take five minutes or five days - depending on your goal.  Having students write about whatever they learned each day will begin that process.  The key is consistency.  Experience has told me that writing-stamina will improve with daily practice.  A five minute writing session at the beginning of the year might yield a few sentences from a student, but by the end of the year, that same student may be able to produce a page of writing in the same amount of time - all informally.
• I don't see a real purpose that would support my content.
• As a teacher of science, music, or physical education, the last thing most of your are thinking is, "Ooooo, what can I have the kids write today?"  But you have to remember that, just as a language arts teacher needs to remember his kiddos with musical and kinesthetic intelligences, you have to be mindful of those students who are linguistic.  You have them.  They hate PE, art, or music, but they love to write.  Meet these students half-way like your counterparts would in a language arts classroom.  Processing information or skills through writing about them is a research-based strategy for learning.  If you can talk about it or write about it, you know it.  And there is physical evidence that you know it because it is all down there in writing.
• I don't want to grade all of that writing.
• I have some news for you.  I've never met a language arts teacher who said to me, "I can't WAIT to go home and grade some argumentative essays tonight."  Nobody WANTS to grade it.  But the beauty of most writing is that it doesn't have to be assessed.  We want to expose our kiddos to as much experience with writing as possible.  So don't grade it if you don't want to, but please walk around and give feedback as students are writing.  The more feedback they get, the more they will want to write for you.

So now that we have established WHY writing is so important for everybody, let's write an essay.  Just kidding.  Let's not.  Let's do something fun and challenging that will help your students process their new information or skills with words.  Several weeks ago when I attended the Day at Judson with Jeff Anderson, he shared this absolutely awesome summarizing strategy with the group.  My colleague and I marveled at its ease and fun, and I couldn't NOT share it with everybody.

Anderson shared the book An Island Grows by Lola M. Schaefer as the mentor text (model) before he gave us the strategy.  Here is how it works:

• Write down ten (or a predetermined number if you want something shorter) nouns (person, place, thing, or idea) that connect with whatever your topic is.  It could be the day's lesson or an article, story, or video.  You decide.
• From that list, go back and connect one strong action word (you can use the word verb if you want) to each of the nouns.
• Arrange them in an order that makes sense.  Capitalize the first letter, and put a period at the end of each pair.
• And that is it.

Here is what we wrote to summarize the story The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe.

We are literature nerds, so it works well with a story written by a great author, but imagine the possibilities!  Teachers of social studies could have students summarize a section of their social studies chapter or write one as a summary of the entire World War II.  PE teachers could have students write about how their game of volleyball went that day.  A student in art might write about how she created a piece of art.  In music, students could write about a concert they performed the night before or their rehearsal that day.  Any teacher could have students read an article, watch a movie, or look at a visual image and use the strategy to summarize, predict, or describe it.  

Get creative with this strategy.  The endless possibilities make it versatile and easily adaptable.  Kiddos who struggle to read or write can handle the task with their own vocabulary while gifted students would be challenged by finding just the right words to use to create the perfect pairing.  And because there are so few rules, you can ask students to create using three sentences, seven sentences, ten sentences, or more!  As a teacher who avoids writing, you can now brag that you used a quick and easy writing strategy in  your classroom, and it worked so well, you'll do it again next week!

October 4 Crumble: Get the GIST

To be able to summarize central ideas or themes of a selection is key in both literature and informational text. The developers of the Common Core Standards felt that this skill was something that should be developed over time and, therefore, mandated that we expect our students to, year after year, prove that they are capable of effectively summarizing.  To be able to summarize a selection, students must choose what is important to the purpose of the writing - calling upon either the author to develop that purpose or some outside source (a teacher or the students themselves) to do this for them.

I find that, in teaching kiddos how to summarize text, more often than not they are missing the boat because their writing lacks focus due to ineffective purpose-setting.  An easy way to teach students to develop summaries is the use of a strategy called the GIST strategy (not an acronym, to my knowledge, but still spelled in all caps).  Although not a CRISS strategy per se, getting the the GIST follows CRISS's Principles of writing and organization along with active learning and transformation of information by giving students a formulaic guide to develop a clear summary of a text selection.  And it's really so simple, it makes me smile.

Here's how it works:

• Students or teacher identifies the purpose of the reading.
• Students read the selection, highlighting or annotating the 5 W's and an H (Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How) as they pertain to the purpose.  All text selections will not develop every component, but careful reading will allow students to identify as many parts as possible.  Rereading may help to identify pieces that might require making an inference like the why and how.
• Once the annotation is complete and/or notes are taken, students should then take the purpose of the reading along with the identified components of the GIST strategy and put them into as few well-developed sentences as possible.  A great writing activity would be to have students create complex sentences using all of the information and correct punctuation!

To illustrate what this would look like, I might ask my students to read a brief text selection about social values of an era in history and the impact that these values had on the art and/or music of the day.  I would tell the students that I'm hoping that they will read to find what impact the values of the era had on art or music and then demonstrate how to look for the 5 W's and an H.  Once students have identified the who (not necessarily one person, but maybe a collective "who" such as a religious group), what happened, where did it happen (could be specific or more general), when did it happen, how did it happen (maybe describe what it looked like OR how people felt while it was happening), and why (what caused it to happen), they can then construct their summary using ONLY the information that they gathered and putting it together into just a few sentences.  And voila! A well-constructed summary! 

Struggling writers may find it more difficult to put multiple pieces of information into only one sentence, so they may need some support.  Modeling the process over and over for them is just good teaching for any student, so be certain to demonstrate your expectations.  Allowing students to work together and giving them immediate feedback while they're working may help those resistant or struggling writers as well.  Try it out a few times.  See what you get.  Once you get a handle on what your kiddos can accomplish, then put some supports in place for them.  In a few cases, you may need to supply some of them with frames for their sentences (writing out part of it and leaving empty spaces for students to fill in words), but try to avoid this if you can.  The idea is to create independent summarizers - even if the sentences aren't perfect. 

See, just talking about this strategy makes me smile because its such an effective use of organization and writing!  Don't forget that strategies like this should be given attention on multiple levels.  Try exposing students to it two or three times before tossing the idea to the wayside.  Ask your students to reflect on their use of it the first time around to see if they can tell that they have more focused summaries.  Then ask them to compare their own summaries the next time you do it to see if they found the strategy less daunting.  By the third time you use it, have them reflect on how it has helped them learn content.  Share with colleagues and see if you can use the GIST in multiple content areas so that our kiddos are being exposed and transferring this skill.  And most of all - tweak it and make it fit your teaching style, personality, and students.  Without your spin on it, it's just another strategy.