Working with Summary

The next PD that I chose to review with arts-based research covered the importance of summary within a lesson. As summarizing is generally thought to be done at the end of a lesson, this teaching method promoted summarizing at multiple times throughout the lesson. According to the PD, summarizing shows evidence of understanding, gives the students’ time to think about the newly attained knowledge, and transfers the knowledge into long term memory. An important aspect of successful summarization was identified as using academic language within the content of the summary to instill the intellectual aspect of the lesson. It was suggested by the instructor of the PD that it might even be useful to hang a sign in the classroom as a signal to remind the teacher to stop and summarize from time to time.

In reflecting on this practice, I began to consider how to better plan my lessons in an attempt to allocate specific periods of summary and summarizing activities. It appeared to me that art education as it currently stands is pretty effective at this learning strategy. Most of the concepts require a certain amount of time to experiment and apply new elements and principles before attempting to use them conceptually. Working in such a way is very accepting of constant reflection and summary. The importance of summary was also highlighted in previous PD’s that we had completed (Cornell Notes and Marzano’s Vocab.) as well as more intense PD’s that we were currently working through.

The notes that I took during the PD presentation are shown here:

I started sketching out ideas similar to the one’s that I produced in the Cornell Notes  and Marzano’s Vocabulary projects where I was trying to illustrate what I thought were the key concepts of the PD practice. Because the importance of summary was an integral aspect of other PD’s, I decided to work more conceptually with this concept I make an image that was much more personal yet still communicated the essence of the PD.  The idea of an artist’s book seemed to be an appropriate way to visualize the idea of summarizing in an attempt to demonstrate understanding.

These are the sketches I developed during this stage of the process: