How to Teach Summarizing: Strategies That Go Beyond 'Just Say the Main Points'

"Just say the main points" is not a summarizing strategy. It's what teachers say when they don't know how to teach summarizing. The result is students who either retell everything in order (not a summary) or pick random sentences from the text (also not a summary).

Summarizing is actually a complex skill that requires understanding what matters, what can be omitted, and how to compress meaning without distorting it. These decisions require judgment that students need to be explicitly taught.

Why Summarizing Is Hard

Students who struggle to summarize usually struggle with one of three underlying problems:

They can't distinguish important from interesting. Something being vivid, surprising, or emotionally engaging doesn't make it central to the text's meaning. Students often include what struck them rather than what the text is actually about.

They don't have an efficient compression strategy. They know the summary should be shorter than the original but don't know how to get there except by copying and hoping the teacher accepts it.

They don't understand the text well enough to summarize it. A summary that's incoherent usually signals a comprehension problem, not a summarizing problem. If students can't explain what a text is about in their own words, they haven't understood it — and no summarizing strategy will fix that.

Teaching the Rule of Three

A practical starting point: tell students that a good summary answers three questions:

1. What was this about? (topic)
2. What happened or what was argued? (main development)
3. What was the point or conclusion? (main idea)

These three elements, written in the student's own words in three to five sentences, produce a functional summary. It's not elegant, but it works as a scaffold because it forces students to think about structure rather than just recounting.

Practice this structure with a short, familiar text before applying it to longer or harder material.

The GIST Strategy

GIST (Generating Interactions between Schemata and Text) is a structured summarizing protocol that works especially well for informational text.

Students read a passage in sections. After each section, they write a one-sentence summary of that section in fifteen words or fewer. At the end, they use their sentence-level summaries to write a paragraph-length summary of the whole text.

The fifteen-word constraint is important. It forces compression and prioritization. Students who struggle with open-ended summarizing often do better when there's a hard limit, because the limit makes the decision-making concrete: "I have fifteen words — which information matters enough to include?"

Somebody-Wanted-But-So-Then

This structure works best for narrative or persuasive texts with a clear agent, goal, conflict, and outcome.

• Somebody: Who is the text about? (character, person, group)
• Wanted: What did they want? (goal, motivation)
• But: What was the problem or conflict?
• So: What did they do about it?
• Then: What happened in the end?

Running a text through this structure produces a summary in five sentence fragments that students can then combine into a paragraph. It's especially effective for students who retell everything because it forces them to identify the structural elements rather than narrating chronologically.

Teaching Students to Delete, Collapse, and Substitute

Van Dijk and Kintsch's summarization rules give students concrete operations to perform on text:

Delete: Remove details, examples, and repeated information. If a list of three examples all illustrate the same point, you need one (or none).

Collapse: Combine a list of specific items into a category label. "Sparrows, robins, and cardinals" becomes "birds." Three examples of good study habits become "study habits."

Substitute: Replace a list of actions or events with the superordinate concept. "She checked her notes, reviewed the practice test, and reread the chapter" becomes "she studied."

Teaching these as explicit operations gives students a toolkit rather than a vague instruction. Practice each operation in isolation before combining them.

Modeling and Thinking Aloud

Every summarizing strategy benefits from teacher modeling with think-aloud. "I'm reading this paragraph about climate change. There are four sentences. Sentences two and three are examples — I'll delete those. Sentence one is the main claim. Sentence four is a summary of the examples. So my summary of this paragraph is..." Students need to see the decision-making process, not just the product.

Your Next Step

Pick one summarizing strategy and one text you're already planning to teach. Add a single structured summarizing task at the end of the reading — three questions, a GIST sentence, or a SWBST frame. Collect the summaries. Use what you see to plan what to reteach and what to build on next time.