Summarizing and the Common Core State Standards

In response to a recent blog post about rigor and the Common Core State Standards, Tracy commented:

The CC Bundles mandated to us use "summarizing" extensively. I was a little surprised to see this low level (DOK) task used so often in the bundle. I assigned the summarizing as HW to determine a)who had read the selection and b)to determine their comprehension of it.

There are a couple of key points here.  First, summarizing may or may not be a low level task.  For students who have never summarized, the task of pulling out key information to describe in a few words what they have read or learned may be challenging.  However, many students simply write down the topic sentence, or something you said, or write down everything they know hoping you will choose the correct part.  None of those are summarizing.   As a result, you may need to teach the skill of summarizing.  However, then we need to move to the next level of analyzing and synthesizing information.  But remember, unless a student can summarize, he or she can't move to the next step!