What does understanding look like?

Define understanding.  Is it emotion? Is it to share and to apply?  Is it transfer into a new context? Is it being able to articulate? Does it involve stretching yourself? Is there a range of degrees involved? Is it performance, added together with flexibility, to serve the purposes as needed?  Does it involve risk-taking?

For example,  I struggled with the math in Advanced Statistics, but I could perform an analysis of what the statistics meant in any given situation and explain that meaning in non-mathematical terms.  Did I understand?

Understanding is sometimes considered as the ability to perform a range of needed activities. There is knowledge, which has to do with facts or figures, concrete data. There are skills that show what we can do or perform or bring to bear on a problem. And there is understanding. Understanding has been described as “what sticks after everything else fades away.”

Understanding can be viewed through various filters, such as, will it make someone a better human being? Or will it still be important to the learner beyond 10 years or more. There is a difference between understanding and knowledge and skills.

Examples of knowledge:  knowledge would be to know the plot of the book 1984 or details of the book.  Knowledge would be to know about the events or characters in the book.

Examples of skills:  To be able to quote from the book.  Or to write well and construct good sentences. To be able to compare and contrast the characters’ motives.

Examples of understanding:  To make connections between the events in the book and today’s world.  Or to make connections between the ideas of losing freedoms and paranoia and fear.  Understanding brings a sense of the personal to the learning.

The most important thing for all of us to remember, whether teaching young people or adults, is this:  the person doing the reading, writing or thinking, the doing, is the person learning.  I’ve tried to keep this uppermost in my mind whenever I teach. But even more importantly, I try to keep it in mind when I am planning.  How can we bring that sense of the personal to the learning? How can we best foster understanding?

If you know what you want them to learn (knowledge) and what they will be doing (skill) to foster that learning, it is easier, not harder, to figure out ways to accomplish the goal of understanding, and to adapt to changing circumstances or needs.

Remember to allow learners to use a variety of strategies and styles to accomplish the learning. Not everyone learns the same way or with the same set of tools.  Not everyone views the process through the same filters or will arrive at the same answers.  And not everyone will come to the same understanding.

So, what does understanding look like?  I don’t know exactly.  That’s one of those Big Questions.

The Big Questions really have no predetermined answers when personal learning –understanding– is taking place.   If they did, there would be no advancement possible.

Enjoy!
Teresa Roebuck

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