November Unit Plan: Teaching Students to Synthesize + Draw Inferences in Fiction
Synthesis and inference are to reading what voice is to writing.
Here’s what I mean:
It is critically important. It’s almost the thing. There is no such thing as a great reader who isn’t great at synthesizing and making inferences. And yet, putting our finger on it — exactly naming what it is and how to do it — is a challenge. We ask students to do it without truly being able to teach it to them.
To be honest, it has often sounded like this in my class:
“Well, you synthesize what happens in the story by, like, remembering it and putting it together in your head, and then make an inference by reading and thinking and then… you know…inferring what the writer doesn’t directly tell you. And so then you understand the story!”
And then I felt frustrated when students couldn’t do it.
Am I the only one?
Sometimes the only way I figure something out is by jumping into teaching it. So, I set out to design a unit that would teach students what synthesis and inference-making actually look like, and in making that unit, I understood synthesis and inferencing better than I ever had before. Here’s what I discovered:
So, here’s what we need to teach:
How to determine what we actually know from the text and what we don’t
It is not unusual for students to struggle with this, even in my 12th grade IB literature course. Sometimes our assumptions, misunderstandings, and partial understandings feel like facts from the text … and they aren’t. So we need to begin with a firm foundation of what does the text truly tell us and what questions do we have as we read.
Strategies for synthesizing different kinds of information in a text and using it to draw inferences.
As fluent, sophisticated adult readers, we pull together lots of different kinds of information inside (and outside) to develop understanding. So, we need to show students how we use text evidence, characterization, and prior knowledge to answer the questions the text doesn’t come right out and answer.
The Unit
You can use this unit in one of two ways.
Lift-and-Teach
Choose just the lessons that best apply to the kinds of synthesis and inference-making your students will need for the text at hand in your class! Teach just one strategy and teach others later.
The Whole Unit
Teach the whole unit as I lay it out here with my texts or whole-class texts of your choosing!