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:
- 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.
- 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.
- Can apply—effectively use and adapt what we know in diverse and real contexts—we can “do” the subject.
- Have perspective—see and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; see the big picture.
- Can empathize—find value in what others might find odd, alien, or implausible; perceive sensitively on the basis of prior direct experience.
- 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:
- Observing closely and describing what's there
- Building explanations and interpretations
- Reasoning with evidence
- Making connections
- Considering different viewpoints and perspectives
- 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.