Digging Deeper with Inferring

This comic helps us to think of how our students sometimes feel when we ask them to infer. 

We could understand this comic (which is a very small amount of text), but only after using different strategies and having conversations with others to help us understand.

Let's think of this when we ask our students to read text that may not seem complex to us but could be very challenging for their growing minds. 

2 things we discussed that will be SUPER helpful in guiding our kids to think deeper:

1. TIME-it takes ALOT of time to be able to think through a complex inferring prompt. Ensuring the kids have plenty of time to reason through and think about it will help them gain confidence and take time in their independent reading to think reasonably. 

2. CONVERSATION-Just like adults, our students need to be able to talk about concepts that are hard to grasp. If they are able to hear others' thoughts and pair them with their own (along with text evidence), they are much more likely to have a thoughtful, more targeted response.

Here are some BRILLIANT thoughts that our PLCs came up with from the Inferring Training on Monday:

 

Quotes from Tanny McGregor's Comprehension Connections book (the chapter on Inferring):

“Reading is important-read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.”

-Gwendolyn Brooks, poet

“You can’t tell any kind of story without having some kind of theme, something to say between the lines.”

-Robert Wise, filmmaker

“What I like in a good author isn’t what he says, but what he whispers.”

-Logan P. Smith, essayist