Synthesis is hard. It is difficult to take information from many sources, transform that information into something that makes sense to you, and then adapt your understanding of the world to accommodate the new way that you see the world. This is where learning gets personal. There is an investment. This is one of the key processes for really embracing information…and I am not good at making sure that my students know how to do this.
I am like most teachers in that I don’t model this step in the learning process very well because I have always thought that the students knew how to do this. This may not be true (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007). Synthesis is a complicated process that requires students to understand the individual pieces of information that they have found AND how those pieces fit together in some sort of way that is new for the students.
Questions are the foundation of learning. Questions allow you to go off and try to find answers if you are committed enough, and, while our searching strategies have changed with the use of new technologies, the search is still essential. Evaluating resources is still essential. Making meaning is essential and sharing out is still essential. All of these parts of the puzzle I knew were important, but what I didn’t realize until I reflected on my practice was how little effort I go through on a regular basis to make sure that my students understand how to bring all the pieces together.
The irony here is that I preach about how we have set our students up for failure in this area because we send them from subject to subject in school as if each subject were a stand alone part of the human knowledge base and I bemoan the student responses to discussions in my class that are cross curricular because I hear, “This is English, right? Why are we talking about philosophy, physics, free will and Moby Dick?” My reply is usually, “Everything is connected. You have to be able to transfer knowledge from one kind of class to another and from one situation to another. You understand that don’t you?”
If they have never been taught to put it all back together and had it modeled for them, the answer may very well be no. This is a shame considering that the ability to synthesize is part of almost every unit (Darrow, 2005). Sometimes, I wonder why something obvious is so hard to notice. That rocks with eyes would sell, that a piece of wire could be molded into a shape that would organize life for you, that superglue shouldn’t be applied generously to hands AND other items at the same time, and that we should be actively teaching our students how to put the fragments of knowledge that they find on their own (or more often that we give them) back together again.
Synthesis is hard. This is apparent from the fact that I didn’t consciously think about how to teach my students the process that I go through and processes that they could go through. If I am good at synthesis and have a hard time sometimes putting the pieces back together, how can I expect students to know how to do it? Hopefully they have had teachers who see that this skill needs active modeling (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007). I have a feeling that this doesn't happen most of the time though, based on Eagleton and Dobler’s (2007) statements and the statistics shared by Pitler and Hubble (2010) at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Leadership Boot Camp about the delivery of instruction in the average classroom based on McREL’s observations.
Perhaps the reason that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again was the fact that they attended schools where their teachers thought that they knew how to put things together and never actually taught them how to do it. That is a change I am going to make. I am going to explicitly teach my students how to put the fragments of knowledge they have together in a meaningful way by demonstrating how I do.
This is an important change because we are about to move into attempting to work on a global scale. This last year my students decided that they were going to adopt an orphanage in Africa and while they did a great job, it is time for them to begin interacting with the people they want to help. That is why I am attending ISTE 2010 in Denver. Many of the sessions I am signed up for deal with collaborative tools and collaboration in global communities. Before I can teach my students how to interact in a global community, I need to understand it myself. I am attending sessions that I believe I will be able to meld into a single approach for this next year.
The whole time I am sitting in my sessions I will be looking for the threads that tie the information together and will be reflecting on the ways that I synthesize my knowledge into an understanding of how the parts fit together. That way, when it comes time for the school year to start, I will be able to teach my students how to interact with their world and how to make sure that they understand how they think about their world. Perhaps if teachers would have taken a little more time to teach how they thought they would have ended up students who were better at putting the pieces together and poor Humpty could have been superglued.
Darrow, R. (2005, October). Meaningful products: Making the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Library Media Connection, 24(2), 28.
Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for internet inquiry. New York: The Guilford Press.
Pitler, H., Hubble, E. (2010). Informing policy on communication tools with McREL's research. Presented at the International Society for Technology in Education 2010 conference.
