Creative Summaries

Pre-service social studies teachers created a concept map to summarize learning

It is important to practice what we preach. As a teacher educator, my job in not only to teach effective content and pedagogy, but in doing so, to model effective teaching practices and strategies. When we learn about content reading and writing strategies to use in the classroom either while reading a piece of text or while providing instruction, we spend some time focusing on the importance of allowing students to summarize what they are reading or what they are learning. Summary “helps students learn to determine essential ideas and consolidate important details that support them. It enables students to focus on key words and phrases of an assigned text that are worth noting and remembering” (https://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/summarizing). Research has shown that providing instruction in summary enhances students’ writing ability and facilitates learning (Taylor & Beach, 1984; Brown et al., 1981) and improves reading comprehension (Shokrpour, 2013)

Pre-service social studies teachers act out summaries

During our last class session in ED220, Reading and Writing in the Content Area, I asked pre-service teachers to use one of the content area strategies they learned to summarize the learning of the course. My goal in this was twofold. First, I wanted them to use some of the strategies we learned…”sit in the student seat” if you will. Secondly, I wanted to see what they saw as the culmination of their learning.

English and art pre-service teachers created an acrostic poem to summarize their learning

 

What was so wonderful about this task was that each group of students selected a different way to summarize what they learned. One group consisting of pre-service social studies teachers decided to use a concept map. They placed Reading and Writing in the Content Areas in the center and described various strategies and concepts about before, during and after reading strategies. Another group, the English and art pre-service students, selected an acrostic poem to display their understanding of the concepts and research. The third group, consisting of math and science pre-service used visuals to describe and explain some of the big ideas such as text complexity, the idea of “reading apprenticeship” and the use of a tool belt of strategies, selecting the appropriate tool for the appropriate task. Finally, the last group, social studies pre-service teachers, used dramatization to visually display and explain concepts such as the importance of teacher modeling and thinking aloud for students.

Pre-service math and science teachers used images to summarize learning

It was a fun, great way to end the semester. I have complete confidence that these pre-service teachers will take what they learned into their future classrooms!

 

Students pictured: Brenna Barsic, Sam Elliott, Maria Fetty, Nicole Fratrich, Jen Hogan, Mallory Maffit, Ryan, McElhinney, Ryan Morgan, Nate Porter, Maddy Starliper, Joel Trentin, John Yester

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TMI Conference Wrap Up

The Technology, Media, and Information Literacy conference held on November 20, 2019 at Saint Vincent College was a great success. Over 150 educators and pre-service teachers attended this event to learn more about how to best integrate technology, media and information literacy into classrooms and schools. Check out our photo gallery, speakers and breakout sessions. TMI Conference

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