Summarizing Stories: Conflict vs Problem

I'm not sure if anyone else is seeing this problem, but it sure opened my eyes to how kids perceive stuff. We need to help kids make discerning choices in differenctiation between the conflict in a story and the problems characters experience.

I was in an EOC prep class, observing. The kids were reading this passage about Pierce the Spaceman from ereadingworksheets.com.

The text works itself out like this:

Setting, Characters, Problem:  

• Pierce the spaceman has to go get some crystals to power the defese shields for Planet Zaroo.

Rising Action: 

• It was a high gravity day, and it was getting really cold.
• He had to dive through radioactive sludge to get to the crystals.
• As he got the crystals, a Toxipus disonnected his air supply. She shot the beast just before he passed out and died.

Climax: 

• Pierce wakes up in heaven where he is told tha the mus finish his mission to share the power of the crystals. 

Falling Action:

•  He wakes up in the sludge and notices the crystals are leaking air bubbles from where he had nicked them when he shot the Toxipus
• He uses the crystals to breathe and gets back to his spaceship to deliver the crystals. 

Resolution: 

• After a tiny bit of trouble getting his spaceship to start, he's off and away to deliver the crystals.

THE PROBLEM: 

When the boy I was working with was asked to summarize the story, he describe the CONFLICT as the Toxipus disconnecting the air supply.

Y'all, that's not the character's main goal or problem he is trying to resolve. It's just an obstacle in the rising action! Missing that key piece of data would change the reader's understanding of the character's motivation and the major point/themes of the story.

Solution: We need to make sure we make a distinction about the difference between CONFLICT and problems characters experience.  It's important to help students see conflict as the goal the character is trying to achieve. The character will experience more problems in the story. We call those the obstacles he has to overcome in order to reach his goal or solve his initial problem. 

We can also foster more sophisticated thinking by annotating the text for the elements of plot instead of writing the summaries beside each paragraph. We have to go beyond what's in the paragraphs themselves and point students toward thinking about how the paragraphs function to deliver the genres, message, or purpose of the author.

Support for TYPES of STAAR Summary

Accidentally deleted the old post. Dad gummit.

Found something interesting…I printed all the 5th grade summary items from the lead4ward IQ tool and did a sort to find the types of summary so I could make some lessons for each kind. I recorded the sentence stems by genre and then sorted by what the questions were asking kids to consider. Could it be that we aren't making gains in summary because we are only teaching a part of what the state interprets it to be? What if we named these cognitive moves with students and made this kind of thinking explicit?

Are we teaching summary with multiple genres?

• Fiction assessed 5 times
• Expository assessed 17 times
• Poetry assessed once
• Drama assessed 3 times
• Literary Nonfiction assessed once

Are we teaching all of the TYPES of summary?

• how to summarize the WHOLE text
• how to summarize PIECES of the text
• how to identify SUPPORTING ideas that match main ideas
• how to identify MAIN ideas when offered supporting ideas
• how to make connections about LOGICAL ORDER
• how to RETELL
• how to identify a main idea about a TOPIC or IDEA in the text

Ideas for Summarizing Sections of Text:

• Summarize the sections of a story and explain their function: setting, character description, conflict, rising action, falling action, conclusion
• Summarize sections of articles, noting their structure and function in the passage as a whole
• Summarize standzas of poems
• Summarize scenes from plays, monologues, soliloquy's, etc., situating them in terms of how they add to the the whole play or author's purpose
• Summarize an idea or topic in a text
• Summarize individual paragraphs or sections of paragraphs

Ideas for Quoted Text:

• Offer kids main idea or thesis statements from the text. Have kids find sentences that support them
• Offer kids supporting details from a text. Ask kids to craft a main idea statement from the sentences.
• Note - the state says our kids are choosing distractors that restate the main idea instead of supporting them. Probably need to teach a lesson on the differences between restating and supporting. Seems like that would eliminate a lot of the silly repetition in their written essays too.

Ideas for Logical Order: I didn't realize these were tagged as summary. But it makes sense. I think we need to look for more of this type of stuff in what the kids are reading. There are only two stems available to us.

• What led ____ to consider _____? (resembles summarizing a character's motivation to me)
• According to the article, the _____ began when -

Ideas for Retelling: I didn't realize this rather. But it makes sense. We retell stuff to help us monitor our comprehension. I don't think these stems are that replicable for any text, but they give us an idea of what we could include in our work with texts.

• _______ was originally intended for -
• According to the selection, what is the reason _____?
• According to the article, ____(recall facts).
• In what ways does ____?