I Can See Clearly Now: Synthesis

"Everything is becoming more clearer," two students wrote on a synthesis chart. Those words aptly sum up not just their understanding of the book, but of their  blooming understanding of the way the comprehension strategies work together. 


When I taught synthesis for the first few years, I was apprehensive about starting our synthesis work because I didn't feel I had a clear idea of what it was-- I wasn't even sure when I was or wasn't synthesizing in my own reading. Now, I'm seeing it EVERYWHERE! 

• Synthesizing is when you turn the page of a book and the kids smile, eyes wide-- it's when you see the lightbulb click on. They have listened to the whole story, thinking it is about one thing, only to change their thinking with a turn of the page.
• Synthesizing is when you're teaching a lesson and it seems that no one is getting it until Billy explains it in kid language. Before you know it, all of them are adding more and more and have constructed their own definition of the concept.
• Synthesizing is a puzzle-- some of the pieces are book clues, some are connections, some are visualizations, other inferences, and others questions. Synthesizing is like the whole of the parts. We work the entire year on those parts, but synthesizing is the big picture.

Now that I understand synthesizing, I am seeing theory and practice come together. All of these years, I've read about constructivism and I knew that many of the activities in our room were constructivist. But no one thing I've taught in reading so neatly represents that constructivist viewpoint as does synthesis. Constructivists believe that children build on prior knowledge and that learning occurs when their schema changes. In the same way, readers can connect and visualize and question until they are blue in the face, but unless they keep track of that thinking-- unless they gather up all those parts and make them whole, their thinking will not change. Using the strategies in isolation does not represent what real readers do. There has to be a blending and melding that results in a deep understanding or new knowledge-- i.e. synthesis. 


It sounds so abstract when I write it down, but in our classroom, it's really very concrete. One year, I asked the children to try to teach synthesis in some way to the rest of the class. One group drew a tree and seed. They said that synthesis is like a seed when we start, but as we read, it grows and grows into a big idea. Another partnership thought it was like a puzzle. They said that when you build a puzzle, you start with the easy part, the straight edges, and work in until you see the whole picture. A third group said that synthesis is like a person who knows very little when they are baby, but learn and change as they grow and see more.


To me, synthesizing is like a person walking on a path-- when she stops, she can reflect back on where she has been, and thus see how far she has come. She can predict with some certainty where she'll go from there, but any twist in the path or barrier in the road can change what she thinks she knows and set her on an entirely new path. It's a day by day, step by step, moment by moment journey.


It's what I love about teaching-- that there will never be an end to my journey, because as long as I meet new children, confont new barriers, read new books, talk to different teachers, my path will be ever-changing.