Spotlight on Strategies: Whittle It Down
Even though there is always a mind-boggling amount of invaluable info shared on the Discovery Educator Network (DEN), one of the best resources available is the Spotlight on Strategies (S.O.S) series, a must-see DEN favorite designed to provide teachers with simple yet effective instructional practices for using digital content to support student learning.
To date, there are 70+ teacher tried and tested strategies featured on the DEN blog and now thanks to Lance Rougeux, Vice President of Learning Communities and Educational Consultants at Discovery Education and all-around DEN tech guru, I will now be featuring these techniques on my space. Two thumbs up to this guy!
So, enough of that. Let’s fast forward to the good stuff…
This week’s feature—Whittle It Down—is an instructional strategy that reinforces summarization skills.
Big Idea
Summarizing is an important comprehension strategy which involves more than retelling content. In order to summarize effectively, students must have a solid understanding of the presented material (reading passages, videos, audio files, etc.) in order to synthesize large chunks of information into generalizations. The Whittle It Down strategy is designed to scaffold summarization by having students work independently, then collaboratively as part of a small group, and finally as a whole class to ‘whittle down’ a list of vocabulary words that are most important to understanding the topic being studied. This final list is then used to compose a summary of the topic.
Now that I have your attention, all you have to do is click here to snag a PDF version of this super cool strategy which includes info related to materials needed, steps for integrating the Whittle It Down strategy into lessons, an example and extension activities.
Better yet—click here to check out the entire S.O.S. series on the DEN blog!
So, there you have it: Another S.O.S. trick to add to your edtech toolbox. Stay tuned for additional ways to activate learning in your classroom…
Like what you see? Then be sure to check out other ideas in this series:
