Summary: Does it mean the same thing across content areas?

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We've been in school for four weeks now. In a typical series of events, I recently learned that the science teachers rearranged their units this year so that they can teach the environmental science unit before we head off to the tropical rainforest of Thailand at the end of October. That makes sense. What I also learned recently is that the project students worked on for a few weeks was a webquest in which they researched 25 ecosystems, took notes on their research, and made a slideshow that highlighted 5 they felt were most important. OK, good project.

Image from mytinyphone website

Meanwhile, next door in social studies, our first project in the Native Americans unit involved researching 8 elements of civilization for a specific tribe, taking notes from the research, and making a slideshow with an oral presentation highlighting the top 3 factors that helped them thrive. Hmmm... very familiar.

I found out about this overlap as we were both finishing our respective projects. The kids didn't complain, I just overheard my colleague discussing the project with his curriculum partner. In some ways, the two projects complimented each other nicely. We both had the same expectations for note-taking, thanks to the extensive work our media specialist has done with classes in the middle school on research. The science teacher reviewed/taught students the skills of Google presentations, so I didn't have to; thus the slideshows in my class went quickly. And because my project involved an oral component which the science slideshow did not, I lifted the expectations.

However, all of that was serendipitous. I wish the science teachers had mentioned their re-arranged curriculum units to us social studies teachers, and especially explained their learning activity. If we had known we were doing similar projects, we could have either 1) better coordinated our teaching of the skills since I assume there was a lot of overlap, or 2) one of us could have done a different project so students had a range of learning opportunities during that time period.

With that in mind, I also overheard him saying something about getting summaries from his students after they read the science chapter. Summarizing is a skill I teach in English Language Arts as well, so I was curious if my colleague taught summarizing the same way I did, and if so, I could spend less time teaching it since he already had. I found my opportunity to ask about his summaries, and discovered that his use of the term is not at all how I use the term with my students.

My science colleague breaks the science chapter down into sections, each section with a specific topical question. Students read the chapter sections and then write important information that answers the question in a bullet pointed list. This bullet pointed list is what he is calling a summary.

I'm glad I asked. I was able to express that, to me, what he is calling a summary is what I would call notes. When I ask the students for a summary, I would expect students to take those notes and write them into a short 2-4 sentence paragraph that explains the main idea of a passage and major supporting details.

Fortunately, we have a good working relationship, and he could hear my interpretation without feeling attacked, and could also see the benefit of having a common understanding of some terms we both use. We decided it was worth bringing to a cross-curricular grade-level team meeting to see if we can come to some agreement about the term "summary".

With the CCSS expecting more content-related reading and writing, it is important that the door is opened to these cross-curricular discussions. Raising the students' literacy level means that we need to be clear and consistent with them if we are to help them use the same skills and strategies flexibly and fluently in any context. It won't work if each of us has our own definition of common terms like "summary".