
One mistake I made early on in my teaching career was assuming that students knew how to summarize and take notes, but I quickly learned that was not necessarily true. I found that when I would introduce a grammar concept, students would want to write down every word and every example exactly how I wrote it instead of taking the time to actually listen to and process the information being shared.
Now that I have moved to a proficiency-based classroom and no longer do direct grammar instruction (I have switched to teaching grammar inductively), summarizing and taking notes usually focuses on authentic reading/listening samples and cultural information. I often give my students something to read and instead of giving them comprehension questions, I give them a form like this one...
Here is an example of how this might be completed for the story "El Agua Mágica para el Rey" which I use from a great site for children's stories in Spanish called Chiquipedia.

summarizing_notetaking_templates.pdf |