Inference Hooey: Part Three Addressing Content

I'm ashamed of myself. I called It Says I Say So, inference hooey. Kylene Beers is my reading superhero! She's the one that came up with that strategy. When the folks in the Reading Academy were here this summer, I realized that I needed to do a lot more thinking about inference. It's been a process, and I will gladly admit that I will never have it all figured out.

Beer's strategy does work. But the distinction I am learning about with teaching inference is critical here. The strategy works with content. Check out this graphic organizer from Reading Rockets.

Activating Schema:

Notice the first column: Question. How did I miss this? The question references content. The chart is all about synthesizing a stable set of information with personal knowledge. That's the essence of content!  The reason this strategy works is because it gives a concrete place to record information. It also works because it allows the reader to activate their background knowledge. It does not replicate the act of making the inference in the third column. That comes from something else. 

So I guess my first suggestion in teaching inference in terms of content is to use strategies like this one that give the reader a vehicle for activating schema. In the 5th grade reading academy, we used the Anticipation Reaction Guide: 

Text Structure

Sometimes, inferences are made in relationship to text structure. In this lesson plan, for example, students learn about character changes.  Readers must be able to infer character traits from what the character does, says, or what others say about them. Then the reader must also look at the conflict, setting, and resolution in connection with these traits to make inferences about what caused the character to grow or change. Folks, that's content. It's the evidence we use to make decisions, but not the process of how we make decisions. Be sure to check out the cool interactive activity that comes with the lesson. The questions in the graphic lead the kids through some thinking processes that will help them make inferences. 

Something More Sinister

Sometimes, inferences are difficult for kids because they don't know where to look to reread. When I taught reading improvement classes, my struggling readers didn't want to have to wade through the entire text yet again. It was hard enough the first time. That reveals several problems here that need to be addressed. Fluency, Decoding, Working Memory, Relative Position/Location. 

In the lead4ward ELAR academy, we learned about the four categories that our standards use in Reading and Writing. 

In the Tools to Know rows, there are certain skills that go along with how we think within the text and with the text. In the first row, fluency, context, purpose for reading, questioning, rereading, background knowledge, and sensory images fill the boxes. In the second row, belongs infer, summarize, and connect - all meta-cognitive activities, processes. What I didn't realize before is that if students are having a problem with the second row, it is probably caused by something in the first row. Let's tackle fluency, decoding, and working memory first. 

If students are not fluent enough with reading speed and accuracy in decoding words, their minds fill up very quickly and have little room left for comprehension. Kids who struggle with the words are spending all their cognitive funds on just getting through the text. Their effort concentrates on getting the gist, and there is little to no room left in the memory to process more critical thinking tasks like making inference. Just think of the problems that arise with inference when they didn't even understand the gist of the text! 

(I think I need to write more later about how context, purpose, questions, rereading, background knowledge, and sensory images impact the ability to infer, but I think I'll do that another time.)

Another problem my students had was trying to remember where to find what they were looking for in the text. They didn't have the energy to go through the laborious process of rereading. Teaching them to skim and scan for key words seemed to help some. Close reading and annotation helped too. I asked my kids to write a short who/what note in the margin. When they were looking for text evidence, I had them read their notes to find the right place to jump back into the text. 

I'm playing around with the idea that Gretchen Bernabei uses when she analyzes kernels in mentor texts. What if kids would draw boxes around key sections and name the main function or idea of that portion of the text? That might kill two birds with one stone.

Vocabulary and Concepts

Sometimes, kids just don't know stuff. It's hard to make an inference about stuff you've never seen, heard about, or done. The reading academy emphasized explicit vocabulary instruction that includes phonemes, graphemes, syllable patterns, morphemes, word origins, roots and affixes, and cognates. I agree that kind of work needs to be done. Duh. Word sorts, dictation, decoding by analogy, modeling, read alouds, HINTS, SPLIT, Tier I, II, and III words, Avril Coxhead and academic vocab - there are all kinds of things that can be done and googled. 

Some words and concepts need to be taught before kids begin to read a text. Content common sense, ya'all. But what do kids do about stuff they don't know when they are on their own? Well that's another process.