Thinking & Understanding

For teachers, questions about student thinking often bring to mind "Bloom's Taxonomy," and often equate "understanding" to comprehension. Blooms taxonomy can be a useful shorthand for thinking about the range of intellectual demands teachers foster in their classroom, but it is limited in giving us a full picture of understanding.

More recent conceptions of thinking and understanding are more multi-faceted. Wiggins & McTighe (2005) identified six different (though overlapping and ideally integrated) aspects of understanding adding up to a multi-dimensional view of what makes up a mature understanding of a concept. When we truly understand, we:

1. Can explain—via generalizations or principles, providing justified and systematic accounts of phenomena, facts, and data; make insightful connections and provide illuminating examples or illustrations.
2. Can interpret—tell meaningful stories; offer apt translations; provide a revealing historical or personal dimension to ideas and events; make the object of understanding personal or accessible through images, anecdotes, analogies, and models.
3. Can apply—effectively use and adapt what we know in diverse and real contexts—we can “do” the subject.
4. Have perspective—see and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; see the big picture.
5. Can empathize—find value in what others might find odd, alien, or implausible; perceive sensitively on the basis of prior direct experience.
6. Have self-knowledge—show metacognitive awareness; perceive the personal style, prejudices, projections, and habits of mind that both shape and impede our own understanding; are aware of what we do not understand; reflect on the meaning of learning and experience.

Ron Ritchhart (2011) and his colleagues developed a similar list of high-leverage thinking moves that serve understanding well, those kinds of thinking that are essential in aiding our understanding; and those thinking moves that are integral to understanding, and without which it would be difficult to say we had developed understanding:

1. Observing closely and describing what's there
2. Building explanations and interpretations
3. Reasoning with evidence
4. Making connections
5. Considering different viewpoints and perspectives
6. Capturing the heart and forming conclusions

At UVEI, when we talk about fostering student thinking or understanding, we are talking about these latter conceptions.

Adapted from:

Ritchhart R., Church, M. & Morrison, K. (2011). Making Thinking Visible. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Wiggins, G; McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd Edition. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development.