“Only a person who has questions can have understanding”.

Chapter five starts with this quotation. And after reading it, one may reckon what is the purpose of all this.
The first idea that we should bear in mind is that the aim of our teaching practices should lead to “understanding” and not just knowing contents of facts. But to get understanding we must ask what is called the “essential questions”, those that stimulate the thought and the imagination, leading to inquiry, and as the author quotes “spark more questions”.

But what would happen in contexts where this kind o practice is not encouraged? We would be restricting our practices to just delivery of meaningless contents, and so, easily forgettable. However, the worst consequence from my point of view is that we would be conditioning our students to be passive receivers of established truth; even more, we would be forming citizens unable to criticize or ask questions about the current matters or about what “seems to be right”.

As we can see, on our shoulders lies the responsibility to form people who are creative and critical of the circumstances, and so, be able to propose and encourage the necessary changes to improve our society. But are we really prepared to carry out this task? Are we willing to change the structure of our lessons so as to encourage the development of essential questions? And are we prepared to have critical thinkers in our classrooms who might eventually question us?

Teaching for Knowledge or Understanding?

Are our practices and methods in the classroom aiming to knowledge or understanding? That is the question we are likely to ask ourselves after reading Wiggin’s chapter “Understanding Understanding”.
To answer this question we must bear in mind the distinction the author makes between what knowledge and what understanding are. Through different examples the author tries to make the reader realize on the difference between these two concepts. On the one hand “Knowledge” is seen as a first stage, since it mainly refers to the memorization of facts, the “know by heart”. This stage is important since it is the basis of building up further knowledge or understanding, but even more essential is the process of “understanding”, which is defined as a “mental construct, an abstraction made by the human mind to make sense of many distinct pieces of knowledge”.
The goal of understanding according to the author is to take those pieces of information to produce or find something of significance, i.e. to use what is stored in our memory to go beyond the facts (meaningful inferences). Understanding is also seen as “transferability”, i.e. the ability to transfer what we have learned to new and sometimes confusing settings.
Having in mind the difference in the concepts and the implications of each, we, as a teachers, may wonder about what is going on in our classes. I am sure all of us want to make our students go beyond, have them make inferences and make relations with the information they are given, in other words, make them really think and be successful learners; however not all the time our methods, practices, and activities aim this purpose, and many times they result in misunderstanding or a partial grasp of knowledge. The crucial matter here is (as the author points out) there must be a coherence between our purposes, in this case develop in our students understanding, and the methods used.

Welcome to my blog