Summarizer+Strategy+(practica)

Type ENGAGE

Description
Keynote Presentation

A summarizer strategy helps students review, revise, and stabilize understandings that they have recently constructed. My students had been studying the geometry and classification of angles and I used a summarizer as part of our transition from angles to triangles and polygons. The activity made use of a portion of the map of Boston Commons that showed its waking paths, in particular, the intersection of several paths that created a set of six adjacent angles whose sum was 360º. I made a Keynote presentation that opened with a view of a large map ("Where are we here?") and led to a close-up view of the intersecting paths. Successive slides showed annotations to the map, eventually showing the labels for angles and points, graphic highlighting of lines, and the measurements of some of the angles. I used this annotated map image as the basis for a cooperative learning, questioning/problem-solving exercise that targeted the skills, concepts, and vocabulary that students had been working with.

The timing was right for this kind of strategy. Students will need a solid understanding of the classifications of and basic relationships between angles as we move ahead into triangles and other plane figures. Using Boston Commons as the focus of this activity was important for two reasons. First, not only does it make good sense to relate geometric ideas to real-world situations, but Common Core cites that connection as an essential standard to be met. Second, students had been on a field expedition to Boston earlier that same week and they quickly realized that the map was of where they had just been. I was able to point out details, like: "Paul Revere is buried here; Sam Adams is down here, closer to the sidewalk. Remember?" This relevance to students' lives helped arouse early interest in the activity and I think that connection created an attraction to the problem and helped stimulate engagement.

This strategy was effective in several ways. It clearly communicated the idea that knowledge of geometry provides ways to talk about the world. Having one display of a real-world situation that could support nearly every kind of investigation that students had been learning provided a nice example of how those concepts were interrelated, that they could be found together in the world and not only as distinct academic exercises. This strategy, especially as employed through a cooperative learning strategy (Numbered Heads Together), also effectively revealed students' understanding to both me and themselves. It summarized both the set of procedural applications and the family of concepts that had been the goals of the first part of this unit and it revealed the extent to which those goals had been met.

Our trip to Boston provided a fortunate connection for this summarizing strategy. The particular intersection of paths in Boston Commons that I used happens to have created a very rich problem that ably exposed some key misconceptions in student learning. I'm very happy with the outcomes of this activity and would definitely repeat its use. Moreover, I've seen real value in using a summarizing activity at the natural //borders// of a unit's separate areas of inquiry. Summarizing at these waypoints is like stopping on a hill while on a journey: we look back across the roads just traveled as a way to prepare our minds for the roads that lie ahead.

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