Chapter 5: Learning to Make an Inference

From a teacher's standpoint there were several things that stuck out to me in this chapter. At the beginning of Chapter 5, Beers included a vignette illustrating an experience she had early in her career with a student. She asked her student to a question based on an inference and quickly realized she had never taught her students how to draw inferences. Beers states, "You can't teach someone how to make an inference. It's inferential. It's just something you can or can't do." I honestly do not agree with this statement at all. Like everything we have learned up to this point, by giving our students explicit instruction we enable them to learn in capacities that they once were not able to. Readers who struggle to comprehend text, rely primarily on trying to decode it and if the literal meaning is not there, it is hard for them to find meaning. This is where making inferences comes into play. As a teacher we must directly model how we want our students to make inferences. As we read along, I can highlight pronouns and other clues that give our story meaning and substance.