VIDEO: Using summarisers in the classroom

Tom McGing is a teacher at Ark Walworth Academy in South London. In this short film, he demonstrates how to use ‘summarisers’ to support student learning.

Students digest more information and find it easier to recall things for exams, when they are asked to summarise what they’ve learnt at the end of a lesson.

Tips from the video

Write a note to yourself:

Pupils synthesis the most important learning from the lesson and write a note to themselves that will help them to remember it at a later date.

The most important thing:

‘The most important thing’ is a structure for pupils to write a synopsis paragraph about a topic using the following pattern:

A topic sentence begins, “The most important thing about (the topic) is…”

The student then writes several middle sentences of supporting detail about the topic.

The concluding sentence repeats the topic sentence, with the addition of the word “however” to begin the last sentence i.e. “However, the most important thing about (the topic) is…”

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