Summarising

Group Work/Collaboration and Pair Work:
- Learners use a number of strategies to summarise given texts.
- In mixed ability and mixed gender pairs, learners work collaboratively to use Paragraph Shrinking as a strategy for summarising a text
- Each learner takes turns to read, pause and summarise the main points of the paragraphs in the text.
- Texts must be gender and inclusion responsive, avoiding gender bias language to enable learners embrace gender equality.
- Select easy to understand passages to start with. Create pairs within the classroom, bearing in mind learners who require help on specific skills and who the most appropriate children are to help other children learn those skills.
Experiential Learning:
- Learners listen and watch the teacher model the procedure for Paragraph Shrinking to understand how to use the strategy.
- In pairs, learners take turns playing "Coach" and "Player" in shrinking paragraphs into main points.
- If a player ever gets it wrong, the "Coach" should ask the player to skim the paragraph again and answer the question a second time.
Structuring Talk for Learning:
- Pairs join another pair, to think critically of how to state the main ideas of a given paragraph in 10 words or less.
- Group presenter roles should be assigned to both male and female members to enable learners challenge traditional gender roles and stereotypes.
- Groups share their work with the class for feedback as a way to monitor comprehension of texts.
Group Work/Collaborative Learning:
- Learners use "Generating Interactions between Schemata and Text" (GIST) as a strategy to summarise texts.
- In mixed ability/mixed gender pairs, learners read short pieces of texts. They work collaboratively to answer who, what, when, where, why and how questions based on the text selection.
- Pairs join another pair to condense their answers into a one-sentence summary.
- Groups share their one-sentence summaries with the class for peer feedback to help learners develop skills for problem solving
- Learners are tasked to search for other interactive ways of summarising texts.
Teaching and Learning Resources:
- A variety of text with varying difficulty levels (from different sources including set books for Core Literature in English and other subjects) for practising summarising
Assessment (2.2.2.AS.1). The document marks these depth-of-knowledge levels for this indicator: Level 2 Skills of conceptual understanding; Level 3 Strategic reasoning; Level 4 Extended critical thinking and reasoning.