Before we jump in, let’s consider the act of summarizing. Why is it important for teachers to summarize? There are several reasons. First, your students were just exposed to a whole lot of information. When we summarize, we select the most important concepts, ideas, or events that are the foundation of the lesson topic. Then we reiterate these main points so that they act as triggers to help students remember the details. When you summarize, you tell them what you want them to remember from the lesson. Coincidentally, this provides another exposure to the material students should learn. Another reason is that it provides one last opportunity for students to ask questions about any part they may not understand completely. In addition, it gives you, as the teacher, a chance to evaluate your students’ understanding of the lesson content. Finally, it helps them learn to separate main ideas from details and how to organize their understanding around these main ideas.

Now let’s jump in! First, keep track of the main points for yourself. Second, provide a visual aid for your students that enumerates the main points. And third, summarize during and at the end of each lesson. Let’s look at each one of these in more detail.

Number 1: Keep track of main points for yourself. Obviously you need to know what the main points are! But this point is still valuable because each class can be so different in where discussions go and the questions students raise. So even if you teach the same lesson to two different classes, they may not be exactly the same. While it’s important to be flexible as a teacher, it’s also important to know your lesson well enough to make sure you cover all the main points and then remember to summarize them. This is especially important if you are teaching students preparing for a standardized test. Just because you don’t cover it in class doesn’t mean it won’t show up on the test. If you write the test for your class, then you have some leeway here. In that case, make sure you summarize what was most important to you from the lesson and then make note of that so when you write the test, you can personalize it to your students.

Number 2: Provide a visual aid for your students. A visual aid would be anything the students can look at that would show them the main points. A handout, a list written on the board or even the textbook would all be great examples of a visual aid. This helps students take better notes, know where to find the information again and it addresses different learning styles. Visual aids can contains words or images that will help the students remember the main points long after the class is over and the details are forgotten.

Number 3: Summarize during and at the end of each lesson. The goal of summarizing is to focus your students’ attention on the main ideas. As a strategy, summarizing can be used several times during a lesson; you don’t need to wait until the last five minutes of class to summarize. My classes tend to be longer than an hour, which means we cover a lot of information in one class time. I usually have two or three topics that we cover during a class. But each of those has two or three main points the students need to know. Summarizing these main points for each topic signals to your students the end of one topic and the beginning of the next. It can serve as a transition into a new topic.

In short, remember to summarize the most important points of your lessons for students. You need to keep track of the main points while you are teaching, provide a visual aid of some sort to help your students organize the main points and finally, summarize during and at the end of your lesson. As a strategy, summarizing lesson points will help your students focus on the most important information of the day and provide opportunity to clarify any concepts or instructions that my still be unclear to them.