Facets of Teaching for Understanding

A teachers’ goal is to impart their knowledge to the students. In teaching for understanding, teachers want their students to demonstrate their enduring understanding. Teachers will find out how much their students understand the instructional design through a series of assessments. However, assessing students’ true understanding are both important and difficult tasks because “There are many different ways of understanding, overlapping but not reducible to one another.” (Passmore, 1982) There are many facets and characteristics of understanding. We will explore six facets of understanding.

 Understanding is complicated. There are different types and different methods of understanding. The six facets of understanding suggest that when the students understand, they will be able to explain, interpret, apply, have perspective, empathize, and have self-knowledge. Explanation requires students to make generalization, provide facts and data to make connection to tell the big ideas. Interpretation asks students to make connections from personal stories and to make their text meaningful.

While understanding is the ability to match knowledge, ideas and actions to context are applied Students need “to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.” (Bloom, 1956) Perspective is to be able to see and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; to see the big picture and recognize assumptions. The empathy facet requires students to find value in what others might find strange or incredible. They may recognize sensitivity by their prior experience. This facet helps students to better understand the diversity of thought and feeling in the world. (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005)

To have self-knowledge is to show knowledge of personal styles, prejudices, and projections. They are habits of the mind that both shape and hinder our own understanding. Lastly, self-knowledge is being conscious of what you do not understand and reflect on the meaning of learning and experience. (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005)

 Assessments of understandings are important because teachers as designers want to know the level of comprehension their students have after their instruction of the subjects. Teachers want to know the fruition of their designed lesson. Assessment for facet explanation of understanding is straightforward. Teachers ask students to provide their own explanation to link specific facts with larger ideas to justify their conclusion.

 However, interpretations are contextual and explicit. Some students are more insightful then others. This facet of understanding is difficult to assess because all interpretation are bound by the personal, social, cultural, and historical context. To test for applied understanding, teachers must ask students to provide an appropriate application of concepts and principles to new questions or problems. Comprehension of this type requires performance tasks and it is very time consuming to design the assessments. With a diverse students population teachers must design different assessments that will truly measure this understanding.

 In short, the six facets of understanding help teachers design the assessments that are geared towards understanding. Some of the facets are easier to assess than others. Some are just explanations of the understanding of facts, while others are performance tasks or depend on personal, social, and cultural context.

 Students will demonstrate their perspective understanding by showing insightful and critical points of view. Empathy understanding is to see from inside, to walk in others’ shoe. Teachers also must pay attention to whether students have rise above their ego and self-centeredness in their answers and explanations. Self-knowledge is the wisdom to know oneself. Teachers must stress constant reflections and self-assessment for greater understanding.