Processing and Summarize the Learning

Students must be given the opportunity to process and summarize new information. There are so many ways to do this. When we think of summarizing we automatically think essay or book report. While there is a place for these things, it is important that the students are just regurgitating information. The task given should take them beyond the first level of Bloom's. In order for students to retain the information they must internalize it.

The old standard jigsaw works really well with this. The students have to understand their part of the assignment and teach it to the rest of their group.

One of my favorite vocabulary activities that I assigned my students for vocabulary is to assign them one or two words a day. Before the next day at that same time they must use the assigned word in a conversation at least three times. They would write down who they were talking to, the sentence that spoke the word in, and what the conversation was about.

Another activity I used to assign when I was teaching science, this can be used as either a front loading activity or a review activity. I'd assign each of the students a very small section of the text (sometimes it would be just one paragraph, other times it would all of a particular subheading) and have them become an expert on their assigned section. Then they would make a poster to teach the rest of the class about their section.

A student can memorize almost anything, but to truly understand the information and retain it for any length of time, the students must have time to process and summarize the information.

Tell Them What They Are Going to Learn

To me this is the most obvious step, but also the most under achieved step in the instructional process. The steps for this will work for any classroom, any age group, any subject.

1. Have the standard that you are working on posted. Don't just copy it out of the standards book, write it in a way that will be meaningful to the kids. This doesn't mean to dummy it down. You should always use academic language when doing this.

2. Tell the students what they are going to learn today.

3. Tell them why it's important that they are going to learn to do this.

4. Have them repeat what they are going to learn today. (This way you know that they know and they will be watching to see if they can really learn it. This step defines it for them so it doesn't seem so abstract.)

5. Give an example.

6. Teach them. As you are teaching them, make sure you are checking for understanding.

7. Question the students on what you just taught and if they learned what they were supposed to learn.

8. Have them explain to you what they learned and how it related to the lesson.

9. Assign independent practice.

10. Work individually with the students who didn't learn it.


Tomorrow is Thanksgiving but on Friday, I will post a lesson here showing how to meet these steps. I'll try to do a lesson that is between 5th and 8th grades because it will be easier to adapt both up and down, rather than doing a 12th grade or 1st grade lesson. If you have any questions or would like to request that I write a lesson for a particular topic and a particular grade level, please leave a comment and I'll get to it. Thank you and everybody have a very wonderful Thanksgiving.