Works with any content! Great for social studies or any other subject — amazing tool to have on hand!
Here’s a great tool to add to your teaching resources: Six-Word Summaries! I learned about these at a PD I attended a while back and it’s really been a great addition to my toolbox! You can create a Six-Word Summary assignment with absolutely no prep required on your part, or if you like you can give your students a bit more guidance — but this should take you no more than 5 minutes to accomplish.
The Basic Idea
It’s just what the title suggests: tell your students that they must write a six-word summary related to some content that you specify. The key thing is that the summary must consist of exactly six words: no more and no less. This tool is powerful, causing students to engage with the content on a number of levels:
—They have to reread the content to get started.
—They have to think critically about the content to decide what is important enough to focus on.
—They have to pare down and reformulate their ideas, usually several times, in order to make it fit the six-word requirement.
It’s really a great way to get them thinking and reading, and if you assign it as a pair or group task, it’s also a powerful tool to help them keep their class conversations on topic also!
Teaching Procedure: No Prep Version
Just decide what they need to summarize. Maybe you want the assignment to be a quick entry ticket, so you ask students to recap the whole textbook section covered the day before. For an exit ticket, assign a six-word summary of the entire section read that same day.
To be honest, though, entry/exit tickets aren’t how I usually deploy this strategy. Instead, I ask students to write several six-word summaries on a given textbook section: one for each of the headings / subheadings presented in the written lesson. This can easily take students 15-20 minutes to complete and it’s a great way to encourage them to revisit and review the lesson. Even then I have several ways to incorporate this type of assignment into a class period:
—Read the lesson as a whole class and discuss it as we go. Then assign them to work through the section crafting a six-word summary for each heading/subheading. I will usually count these so I can tell them, “You should end up with 8 summaries in all.” Students that need more time are assigned to finish their summaries for homework.
— Preview the lesson for the class with a few remarks, pre-teaching key vocabulary and concepts. Then assign students to read the textbook section aloud with a partner. Whenever they come to a new heading or subheading, they stop and brainstorm then write a six-word summary of the bit they just read. Then they move on. Again, it’s useful if you tell them how many headings/subheadings there are in the lesson.
—Optionally, direct students in either scenario above to write a final, culminating six-word summary that covers the textbook section from start to finish. If a lesson is the final one in a chapter, you might ask them to write a six-word summary for each lesson in the chapter so they produce a very brief review of what mattered most in that chapter.
Teaching Procedure: A Little Bit of Prep Version
Some students will skip some of the headings even if you specify the final number needed. One easy way around this is to make a quick chart and print it out or load it online for student to complete — in Google Docs, for example.
All you need is a two-column chart. Label the first column “Text to summarize” and underneath that title, list each of the headings and subheadings you are assigning. I typically list them all because it’s very rarely more than 10, which is quite manageable for students. Label the second column “Your Six-Word Summary” and leave all the cells beneath that title blank. Now students have a form to fill out and guidance about which headings to look for. If you want them to do a final full-section summary then add that requirement to the bottom of the first column.
Making such a chart and assigning it in Google Classroom doesn’t take me more than about 5 minutes. Even making paper printed charts is pretty quick.
You might want to make charts for your students the first 2 or 3 times you use this writing strategy, and then go to the no-prep version when students are thoroughly familiar with your expectations. But any charts you do make can be re-used for as long as you teach with the same textbook, so it’s time well-invested in my view.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
When you first start using this strategy, it’s a good idea to be very specific about what makes a good summary. I insist on sentences because then students have to produce a complete, coherent thought about the content. I tell them idea is NOT to list six words that have some significance to the content, but to create a complete sentence expressing the main idea.
Usually it helps to provide examples of what you are and aren’t looking for. I’ll write some that are absolutely NOT related to the section the students are working with. So suppose your class is studying the rise of big business in the 1800s in U.S. history class.
I might write something like this on the board and/or include it at the top of any written form I’ve made:
For the American Revolution, you should:
DO THIS: Washington led Continental Army to victory.
NOT DO THIS: Revolution army 1176 war England victory
Or you could call the two samples strong summary / weak summary or even good example / bad example depending on what you think your students will best respond to.
You might want to point out that sentences can be a little awkward-sounding for this type of writing, leaving out extraneous words like “the” and “a” in order to fit the six-word requirement. I usually also get students asking (ha, pleading sometimes) to not count “&” as a word and such. As long as students are highly engaged, I think it’s a good idea to give them these kinds of breaks. 🙂
SOME FINAL EXAMPLES TO HELP YOU
Suppose your students just read about the early Cold War in U.S. history or world history class. Here is what they might come up for some of the headings:
The Long Telegram –> Kennan proposed the basic American policy.
Crisis in Iran –> Soviet troops remained in northern Iran.
The Marshall Plan –> The Soviets rejected the Marshall Plan.
The Chinese Revolution –> China’s fall to communism shocked Americans.
Okay, so what about grading or feedback?
You’ll probably note that not all of the examples above are the strongest summaries. But that’s okay — I’ll often flip through student work and read aloud each section heading and then a sampling of summaries for that heading. Sometimes I’ll comment on which ones capture the most important information and which don’t (obviously I never mention which students are the authors of the samples I select.) Another powerful way to give fast, easy feedback is to read some anonymous samples and ask the students to each give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to evaluate the strength of each sample. Comment during this procedure as you feel appropriate.
This not only provides useful feedback, but provides yet another review of the key content read the day before, etc. Even better, it’s highly engaging! Students like giving their own opinions (who doesn’t?) and since most of them will be hoping their own summaries will be chosen, they pay close attention throughout the activity!
(In the samples listed above, I would explain that what the Marshall Plan did is more important than the detail that the Soviets said “no” to the aid. I’d also question what happened in Iran besides Soviets remaining there. For the Long Telegram I’d suggest a rewording that manages to include the word “containment,” since that was the basic policy Kennan proposed. The best summary of those samples is the one about the Chinese Revolution, I think.)
And as for grading? Well, that’s up to you of course, but I usually just grade these for completion. I might make the whole thing a 5 or 10 point assignment, classify it as classwork (or maybe homework if most students needed to finish at home) and give full points for anyone who finished the entire task. The exception to the “grade for completion” policy would be if I saw a lot of exact copies — students or teams working on their own may produce very similar summaries, but they won’t have mostly duplicates among the 6 or 8 summaries assigned.
One final note
I also find it really handy to ask students to evaluate their own and if you feel comfortable, others’ work on this kind of task. Ask each student or team to look at their charts critically and circle the summary they think is the very strongest they wrote. Pass papers around the room and ask each person to star the strongest one they read. With this approach you can see what the self-feedback is versus the peer-feedback. These markings can also help you if you review the summaries out loud, helping you quickly pick out the best one on each page. In my experience, the students usually have good judgement with what they circle and star!
So . . . that’s it. This post is pretty long because I wanted to give you lots of options and things to consider if you use this approach in your classes. It’s great for all social studies content, not just history — economics, government, you name it! It can easily be adapted to science and literature as well. The good news is that it probably took you longer to read to this point than you’ll need to deploy this strategy in class, even for the first time.
I’d love to hear from you!! If you assign some six-word summaries, please think about popping back here and leaving a comment about how it went, or an example summary or two that really impressed you!
Happy teaching as always,
Resources to help you teach:
greathistoryteaching 