Teaching Note Creating and Summarizing Skills

We all want our students to learn deeply, but what does that look like? Understanding must be earned by the learner through active mental manipulation of higher order thinking skills. In our information saturated world, teachers are no longer dispensers of information, but rather need to become facilitators of helping students to understand information by directing active meaning making.

Some thinking skills to guide our lessons should include: conceptualizing, note creating/summarizing, compare/contrast, reading comprehension, predicting, visualizing, and perspective/empathizing. These thinking skills encapsulate the essentials of good thinking, they separate high achievers from the rest, they are under taught and undervalued, and finally they give teachers a simple way to increase student achievement and success. These vital thinking skills need to be a part of our everyday lesson instruction because they help students deepen their understanding of content and they are transferable skills that students can use throughout school into their work life.

Let’s talk about note creating and summarizing in this blog post. Research shows that it is important to directly teach how to create notes and summarize ideas. It is not as simple as taking or copying notes. Notes need to be created and the new ideas need to be organized and summarized in order for the learning to stick. The overall goal is to find, categorize, and paraphrase the important ideas in order to hone in on big ideas and supporting details. When students practice this deep type of learning regularly, it helps to develop memory, recall, comprehension, clarify learning, planning, and decision making. These are obviously life skills one needs to have to be successful in school and in life. Lastly, creating and summarizing notes is a great formative assessment because it makes internal student thinking visible to both the learner and the teacher.

Here are some problems we have encountered with our students and note taking: copying of the text word for word, can’t focus on the main ideas, and inability to paraphrase and pull out the most important information.

Here are some ways that we like to have our students practice note creating and summarizing:

We like to use Lego Notes to help students find key details that supports the main idea and write a focused summary.

We like to use Cornell Notes to teach students how to outline ideas and summarize their learning.

We like to use Interactive Notes to help students determine the most important information in a text.

We like to use Window Notes to help students come up with questions, form personal opinions, and make connections to what they are reading and learning.

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