Chapter 4 The Six Facets of Understanding

The aim of this chapter is to make us be aware of the different stages of Understanding in order to facilitate and better assess our students’ learning process. If we as teachers want to reach a thorough and deep teaching for transfer, we must be able to recognize and develop all of these six facets of understanding, which are: Explain, Interpret, Apply, Perspective, Empathy and Self-Knowledge. Once we recognize and understand the objective of each of them, we will be able to design the appropriate task for our students in order to give them the proper feedback to promote their intellectual and social growth.

Explain: We must ensure that our students make inferences, connections and associations.

Interpret: We must ensure that our students make sense of their lives through stories and data.

Apply: We must allow our students to put knowledge into practice through authentic assignments.

Perspective: We must provide explicit opportunities to make our students think critically.

Empathy:  We must help our students see from inside the person’s worldview.

Self-Knowledge: We must facilitate and assess our students’ self-reflection process.

We must remember that we are teaching students to make them become autonomous learners. We must give them space to make inferences, to develop interpretations; we must create authentic tasks to make them use their knowledge in real context and opportunities to make them confront different points of view and perspectives. We must help our students respect other’s points of views and above all, we must contribute with our students’ self-awareness and self-reflection. We want our students really “understand” and not only memorize facts and data. They must be able to make connections with their own realities

Now I try to look inside and discover if I have been able to allow my students to do all the aforementioned. At this stage, I am not quite sure, so I have to continue self-reflecting and analyzing. Again, it is a tough work. Now that I think about this, I believe that this book is making us apply all what we have studied through this MA, interesting...