3 ideas
In contour drawing the eye moves slowly along the edge of the model while the pencil records it at the same pace, and the student is told to imagine the pencil is actually touching the form. The student should look at the model and not at the paper, which forces careful attention and builds a physical sense of the form instead of a set of learned symbols.
Gesture drawing uses fast, continuous scribbles, often only seconds long, to capture what the model is doing: the thrust, weight, and movement of the pose. It deliberately ignores the model's outline and details. The student feels the pose in their own body, empathizing physically with the model, so the drawing records energy and intent instead of surface appearance.
Learning to draw is a matter of accumulating direct experience of real objects, so the student should make a great many drawings, including many deliberately bad ones, instead of polishing a few. A finished-looking drawing is not the goal. The drawings are a by-product of training perception, and mistakes made in quantity teach more than careful correctness made in small amounts.