Synthesize: making it matter
When students synthesize information, they bring together contrasting parts of knowledge they have gathered and construct something new with it. There are lots of different ways in which you can help develop students’ synthesis skills as long as they have the opportunity to revisit and practise using it regularly.
Activities where students do any of the following tend to enhance these skills well:
§ Arrange ...
§ Combine ...
§ Rearrange ...
§ Create ...
§ Design ...
§ Invent ...
§ What if ...?
§ Substitute ...
Deconstruct the thinking
Provide the class with an image that contains a number of different parts and ask them what you can see in the image. Take ideas and add them to the board then deconstruct how they came to these conclusions. For example an image of a fish jumping from a small fish bowl to a larger one:
Explain that they have ‘synthesized’ by deconstructing what they can see, then reconstructing the information so that it shows something new. This is a higher level skill which is very challenging.
Submitted by Johannes on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 15:46
Comments :
Synthesize every lesson
Submitted by Neal on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 22:48.Synthesis should be a skill that we aim for in every lesson. Many teachers work really hard to find new and engaging ways to introduce students to new information. This is an essential part of the learning process, but by no means the end.
Once students have the new information they need to do something with it. At this stage we need to be careful that we do not simply give them an activity similar to the one they completed to gain the new information.
I observed a Maths teacher recently and he was teaching a top set GCSE group about simultaneous equations. He did this by working through some examples on the whiteboard and then he got the students to demonstrate their understanding by doing six more.
The demonstration worked and all the students answered the questions, but the second part of the lesson did nothing to further their understanding or stretch them mentally.
It might have been a better idea to create a visual instruction sheet, using digital cameras and plastic numbers. This could have been more engaging and made the students really think about how the process worked, what actually happened in your head when you were doing the Maths.
SYNTHESIS!