What is understanding? Thinking from our personal experiences

Let's explore understanding from a personal perspective by reflecting on and sharing our own experiences and comparing them to group responses. This process will show us what we think about understanding as a group as the course begins.

What follows is a set of questions about understanding that we have asked people all over the world and in previous runs of this WIDE course. The tool asks you to answer one of three questions and then to compare what you said to what others in the course say. Then you answer the next question, compare, then the third, and compare one last time. (If you’re the first to use the tool, be sure to check back for the comparing part!) Answers appear alphabetically on a list. Press < NEXT > to move on.

This is the first time we’re using this particular tool to build such a list in a WIDE course. Trial run! Here we go, modeling our mantra: Give it a try, Expect Errors, Have a think, Adjust (GEE-HA!).

Here’s the translation of this spiraling process:

Give it a try: Don’t wait to get something right before you use it. Find a low-stakes situation and try out what you’re wondering about.

Expect Errors: Use the inevitable mistakes diagnostically to learn from them.

Have a think, Adjust: Then, reflect, re-version (i.e., change), and try again.

I hope that’s how we’ll work together throughout this course. "Everything is a draft in search of its revision."

(By the way, doing this exercise usually surfaces all sorts of interesting habits of people in the group. It's a wonderful way to unearth resources in a class or faculty! Try it with your students, or in a department, faculty, board, or parent meeting, whenever you’re introducing the concept of understanding. Just write all responses on a chalkboard, whiteboard, overhead, chart paper list, or on your computer while it’s projecting onto a screen.)

Some suggestions for you now:

• Lead with key words and main ideas, not sentences and nuances. Why? Because the tool groups ideas alphabetically. So "close observation" doesn’t group with "observing" (but we’d like them to be together!)
• List as much as you can think of quickly.
• First thoughts, best thoughts for this one. Don't worry if you can't write everything -- just get down what comes to mind.

Ready to begin? Here we go.

Question 1: What do you understand really well?

Think for a moment about something that you understand very well. It might be something you teach, something you studied in college, or something non-academic that you do in your house, your work, or your play. But it should be something that, intuitively, you think you understand pretty well.