Supporting Main Idea Identification and Text Summarization in Middle School Co-Taught Classes

Abstract

Being able to identify the main ideas within a complex multi-paragraph content-area text is an essential reading comprehension skill. It is especially important for content-area and special education co-teachers to provide explicit instruction in this skill to meet the needs of their students with learning disabilities who frequently struggle with understanding text they read. To help students with main idea identification, co-teachers can provide students with explicit instruction on how to generate a main idea statement for individual paragraphs or sections of a text. Co-teachers can extend this instruction by incorporating peer-mediated practice to help students strengthen their main idea statements. Finally, co-teachers can instruct students to use their statements to summarize the text. This article provides guidance for supporting the main idea identification and text summarization skills of middle school students in a co-taught classroom.

Preparing to Implement Evidence-Based Literacy Practices in the Co-taught Classroom

“…For example, because co-teachers scaffold the implementation of the CALI IF practices over the year (i.e., see section “Planning Tip 2: Integrate Evidence-Based Practices” for details), co-teachers’ fidelity should be monitored at least once after they have had a chance to implement each practice for a minimum of 3 weeks (e.g., enough time for co-teachers to work out any kinks in their implementation). Co-teachers’ fidelity checks should reflect all the practices that have been introduced up to that point (e.g., world and word knowledge in addition to get the gist; see Kearns et al, 2021; Shelton et al, 2021). Thus, implemented cumulatively, co-teachers may see improvement in practices over time.…”

“…While monitoring students, co-teachers should remind students about procedures for applying strategies and redirect off-task behavior. For example, co-teachers should monitor students when they are engaging in peer-mediated literacy practices such as associate gist (see Shelton et al, 2021) to ensure that they are following the peer-mediated instructional procedures.…”

Individualizing Literacy Instruction in Co-Taught Classrooms Through a Station Teaching Model

“…Student support is designed to take place within 1 or 2 days of the whole-class CALI associate gist lesson (see Shelton et al, 2021 for a description of the peer-mediated main idea strategy known as associate gist). The activities at each station align with different CALI instructional framework components (e.g., word knowledge or getting the gist), and students in the three groups (i.e., review, practice, extend) complete different activities based on literacy need, as measured by how well they were able to identify the main idea of each section of the text used in the previous whole-class CALI lesson, and whether they need continued support to comprehend it or are ready for a more challenging text (see Wexler et al, 2021 for guidance on selecting text).…”

“…Toward the end of this lesson, teachers ask students to separate from their partners and generate a gist statement for the final section of the text independently. If there is time in the lesson, students can also independently complete the text summary, a synthesis of their gist statements (see Shelton et al, 2021 for a complete discussion of text summary). In this way, each student’s gist log (i.e., the worksheet on which students record gist statements and the text summary) acts as a formative assessment and provides most of the information teachers need to inform group placement, which is aligned with recommendations for instruction that is learner and knowledge centered (Cook & Rao, 2018; Tomlinson, 2005; Tomlinson et al, 2003).…”

“…To do this, teachers can rank-order students by ability, divide the list in half, and begin by pairing the highest-achieving student from the first half of list with the highest-achieving student from the second half. For a full description of creating associate pairs, see the procedure outlined in Shelton et al (2021).…”