Synthesis

Synthesis is one of the highest-order thinking skills that students will develop in FEI classrooms.
critical for success in college, as well as in the professional work world. An inherently individual and
creative process that draws on one’s reflective capacities, synthesis is the capacity to bring together
an array of elements in such a way as to create a new way of looking at and thinking about them: a
critical skill for both college and professional learning. Developing this skill is challenging, particularly
for OAUC students who typically have had little opportunity to explore their own personal
understandings of academic material in a systematic way. In order to foster this capacity in students,
all FEI lessons close with a brief period of time devoted to this work. This period focuses on two
tasks: first, providing students with an opportunity to revisit the lesson’s objective in order to
articulate new learning and insight. And second, fostering the critical practice of reflecting on one’s
learning process, particularly with regard to use of the independent learning strategies.

It is this second task—the practice of metacognition-- that ultimately converts the learning
strategies into the tools students need in order to become fully independent learners. The more
facile students become at noticing which strategies they are using for a given academic task, and
how effective the strategies are, the greater the possibility that they will develop an intuitive and
instinctive capacity to use the strategies. It is this capacity, that we see in college students when they
hypothesize about an outcome in an experiment; or attempt to understand one of Shakespeare’s
sonnets. We also see it in professionals who are learning new software programs, creating new
systems for their work, or expanding their field of practice. For many of us, use of the learning
strategies has become nearly automatic, in the way that tying our shoes is. For OAUC youth, the
synthesis period provides a critical opportunity to unpack the automaticity, understand it, and begin
to explore potential future applications.

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 Because the synthesis period is generally limited to 20% of the lesson (the final 10 minutes in a
50-minute period), the FEI planning process encourages teachers to use this time as efficiently as
possible by limiting the numbers of questions they ask students (better to ask one synthesizing
question and one metacognitive question, than to create a quiz with ten factual or procedural
questions), and to avoid creating activities that are complicated to implement. As students engage in
this reflective process, teachers are able to gather formative (or summative) assessment data that
will help them plan the next day’s lesson.

For Melissa, synthesis and metacognition are a centerpiece of

her work with students. In her unit on women’s history, one of her Social Studies Journal Reflection

lessons expands the synthesis period so that students can create • How did you decide what
information was pertinent
a short, fun, dialogue illustrating the struggles women faced in the when reading primary source
documents?
mid-1880’s. The activity is light-hearted, but requires that students
• How do you plan to use this
use both the content and the learning strategies they practiced strategy of determining
during the investigation (determining important ideas in The importance and summarizing
in the rest of the unit since we
Declaration of Sentiments, from the Seneca Falls Convention): will be reading quite a bit of
expository text?
students are to pretend to be women on a lunch break at the
--Melissa Sltaer’s lesson on the
Seneca Falls Convention. The lesson closes with students Declaration of Sentiments
completing a reflective journal entry (see inset).

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 Metacognitive Guideposts for Synthesis
1. What students can I ask that will let me know that students have learned the objective?
2. What metacognitive question will help students understand how they learned this objective?
3. What level of Bloom’s are my questions?...is it the same level as the objective?
4. Are these questions like to provide students with an “ah-ha moment”: what might they synthesize
now that was not available to them in the investigation period?
5. What format should I use for the synthesis period: exit ticket, journal, round robin, paired share,
quiz? Why is this the best format for this lesson?

Frequently asked Questions about Synthesis:

1. Our periods are only 45 m inutes long, I don’t have tim e to include a synthesis
period in m y lessons.
In schools where periods are short it is challenging to carve out ten minutes each day for
synthesis activities. From a purely pragmatic perspective, there may be some days when the
synthesis period is an incredibly brief check-in and others where it is more substantive. What we
have found, is that teachers who are able to include this final segment in their lessons typically
discover that students’ retention of material and their active use of the independent learning
strategies is greatly improved.
2. W hat’s the difference between synthesis and a quiz?
A quiz can be a synthesis activity if the right kinds of questions are asked: questions that explore
the big ideas of the lesson, questions that encourage students to have an “ah-ha” moment of
understanding: questions that require metacognition. Quizs are an example of a synthesis
activity, but there are many additional avenues that can be used to support synthesis.

What we have found, is that frequent testing can have a very dampening effect on student’s
capacity for thoughtfulness, as tests immediately turn a learning activity into a performance, and
one in which the teacher is clearly in control, rather than the students. For OAUC youth in
particular, this lack of agency around the work of synthesis can lead to greatly diminished efforts.

Some of the most effective FEI classrooms are those in which teachers quiz and test
infrequently, instead relying on journals, round-robins and other facilitated, low-stakes activities
to support the building of synthesis and metacognitive skills.

3. If I ask my students how they learned something, they will just tell me that they
don’t know. It doesn’t seem like a very effective activity.
Initially, most students will struggle with—or explicitly resist--this request, while a few will be able
to desribe the steps they used to figure something out--particularly in math, where contemporary
math instruction generally asks students to document the steps they used. What is rare is to find
are students who have been taught to understand how they learned something. As in all aspects
of the FEI, we encourage teachers to scaffold the synthesis period so that students can use

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 these footholds as a bridge to deeper understanding. In addition, we caution teachers to be
patient: it takes teachers concentrated time and effort to develop effective synthesis activities,
and it takes students just as long to learn how to engage with the activities in meaningful ways.

4. I don’t need to do an assessm ent at the end of the lesson. I can tell how well
students understand som ething when they are working on the investigation and I
am conferencing with them .
Effective conferences are powerful formative assessment tools for teachers and students, but
they aren’t specifically designed to provide students with an opportunity to synthesize all of the
learning that occurred during the lesson, while also reflecting on how the learning occurred and
whether or not the approach to learning was effective (the use of metacognition). Synthesis
activities are specifically designed to create an “ah-ha” moment for students in which all of the
pieces of a lesson come together in a meaningful way.

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