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Synthesize

Students will stop and think often to synthesize new information. They will use this time to find evidence, develop new ideas, form opinions and/or change perspectives to generate a personal understanding of the text. Whereas my goal is to facilitate synthesis all year long, my students and I study the strategy in depth the ninth month of school.

Getting Started: Are We Retelling, Summarizing or Synthesizing?

Here's a silly story I heard on the radio. I'm retelling it.
 

There once was a squirrel who went into an ice cream shop and asked the clerk, "Do you have walnuts?"

"No. Sorry. We're out of walnuts today."

The squirrel went away, but came back an hour later and said, "Have you got any walnuts?"

The clerk looked at the squirrel angrily. "I told you. We don't have any walnuts now get out of here."

The squirrel went out the door, but in an hour came back again. "Have you got any walnuts?" he asked the clerk.

"I told you we don't have any walnuts. Listen here. If you come back here one more time I'm going to nail your paws to the counter. Now, get outta here!"

The squirrel went out again but, sure enough, an hour later he was back. "Have you got any nails?" he asked.

The clerk look surprised. "No. I don't have any nails."

"Great!" the squirrel said. "Have you got any walnuts?"

Retelling

The dictionary defines retelling as telling a story again in your own words. In North Carolina, our state objectives require that students include the main points - the characters, the setting, the beginning, middle and end. That's what I just did when telling this story.

Summarizing

Summarizing is much different than retelling. When summarizing, students practice condensing the story to its most basic elements. In the case of our squirrel story, I could summarize by saying, "A squirrel came into an ice cream store four times and irritated the clerk by asking him each time if he had walnuts." A summary is short and more generalized.

Headline summaries

Another puzzle, writing a headline summary, requires students to tease out the very essence of text. In this exercise, I challenge kids further by asking them to summarize in 4-6 words or less. If having difficulty, it helps to start with the main character followed by what he does: "Squirrel drives clerk nuts!" (See summarizing page on this site.)

Why synthesize?

Synthesizing involves even more abstract thinking. Students reflect on their reading, combine the ideas they gained by reading with their own knowledge, and create new ideas, perspectives or opinions, and a personal understanding of the text. In the case of our squirrel story...

• Students might generalize, "Asking over and over for something will result in annoying people."
• Or, determine their opinion, "I think the squirrel should have given up the first time."
• They may see a pattern: "In most jokes, things happen 3 times."
• They may internalize a lesson: "I think the author wrote this story to show that we should never give up."
• They might predict: "From this story I think the clerk will laugh and say, "Listen. Come back tomorrow and I'll be sure to have some walnuts for you."
• Or, they may draw their own conclusions, "This squirrel is obviously nuts."

Encourage synthesis

When a student is working at the highest levels of synthesis, he defines his beliefs and defends his thinking with evidence, generating individual insights of texts and issues. Unfortunately, we most often require retelling and summarizing assignments, demanding only that students think at the lowest levels of synthesis. This is the time to examine the tasks you're assigning. Consider work that necessitates synthesis such as...

• Stop and collect their thoughts during reading before moving on. They can do this by sharing with a partner or writing in their daybook.
• Use a double entry journal to sort big ideas from less important details. By examining a text in this way, children closely consider the importance of each detail.
• Summarize the main points after reading. Compare ideas to a partner's. Determine a combined list partners agree on.
• After reading, write a generalization that states the child's opinion, change in perspective or new question(s). Defend a pattern, explain new information the child didn't know before, or create and explain a new idea.
• Debate.
• Code the text; students mark places where they thought of new ideas, where confusion was clarified, or what made the child think differently.

So What? Book "Reports"

I like "So what? Projects" all year and especially during synthesis study. The projects come from asking readers, so what do you want to do as a result of reading this book? The idea was formed by watching what adults do when they finish reading: tell people, find more books in the series or by the author, talk in a book club, get frustrated and motivated to action! (I don't know any one that writes a book report.)

Looking ahead

Whatever the reaction to the particular book, I would rather the response to come from each reader's heart. I'm not real keen on asking students to prove they read the book any more. You can tell that as a teacher preparing children for 2030, I am no longer satisfied with dioramas, book reports, or posters - unless the idea came from a reader. What does writing a book report prepare a child to do, really? I'd rather challenge students to respond to the book in a way befitting their reaction to the book.

So now, when a student finishes a book, I ask, "Now that you have read this information, what are you motivated to do? How will your life be different? How will you think or act differently?"

Project ideas

Maybe the reader will study the author or the topic because the book piqued her interest. She might write a letter to the newspaper, a legislator, or a neighbor because she's mad and wants to fix the problem she just learned about. What if she decides to tell others about the book and convince them to read it because it moved her so much? Maybe she will choose to read the book again. It's possible she will create a script from the book and enlist the help of friends to act it out for an audience. Kids even advertise their choices on closed-circuit television.

On the other hand, she may not want to do a project at all. She may simply want to read another book, something she likes better or enjoys just as much. And... what's really wrong with skipping the report and just reading more?

I encourage you to evaluate whether you're asking your students to continue to prove they can retell and summarize more than synthesize. Once students start the So-What? projects, one idea flies through the classroom and (almost) everyone has to try it. Make charts listing the ideas your readers invent so others can remember them. Reading is much more fun and the projects more rigorous when students synthesize.

Sample Lesson: Putting It All Together

This month our focus is on this question: "When do we use each strategy?" We can't use every strategy in every circumstance, so what strategy matches what problem?

For example, if I read a difficult text, I would use coding, highlighting, and summarizing. If I read a recipe I would use overviewing, skimming and scanning. If I read a play, I would slow my pace, underline, and keep a character list. I would also pay attention to main idea and theme. If each step has been modeled, guided, and used independently, our readers will use strategies appropriate to the task.

Since students need explicit direction in "when to use what," I provided a jumping off point with the lesson below. A student worksheet is below, also.

MATERIALS