Summarizing and Note Taking with Nonlinguistic Representations

As part of my American History and science units, I have my students complete concept maps to help them organize the information they have learned in the unit. The maps create an easy to follow nonlinguistic representation for the key concepts in the unit. I then have my students use these concept maps to write a unit summary. I have found that having my students complete this, causes them to deeply analyze the information, throw out trivial nonessential information and really focus on the important concepts. The concept map also provides me as a teacher a great map to follow from the beginning of the unit to make sure that I cover and reinforce the key concepts and ideas. This strategy seems to be reinforced in Marzano's book, and I am excited about that, as I can testify that it works for my students in the classroom. Marzano states that teachers should provided expected formats and modeling, that they should be a work in progress, and should be used as study guides for tests. I do a lot of modeling with this for the first half of the year, and provide the specific format of the concept map, and help them develop their summaries from the map as a class, then in small groups and finally individually. We use these as our study guides for unit tests as well as end of level testing. Toward the end of the year, they are able to create their own maps, as we go along using important key ideas, and can then write their own summaries. I can only hope that they will take this very effective strategy with them throughout their lives, as we have spent so much time working on it in 5th grade.