Six Facets of Understanding

“Depth, Breadth, and the Six Facets of Understanding

The six facets of understanding, recapped below, provide helpful direction as we develop a blueprint for uncoverage--depth and breadth-to ensure meaningful understanding of what is studied. [The bracketed comments are Dr. Slatta's brief explanations of each learning objective. Notice that the objectives are cognitive, how you think, affective, how you feel about what you think, and metacognitive, how you change and improve your thinking as you reflect upon your activities.]

Facet 1: Explanation

[learning to explain what happened and why, in a logical supported fashion.]
Students have opportunities to build, test, and verify theories or explanations. The textbook and teacher theories become uncovered as we tease out and test the assumptions, questions, arguments, and evidence that lie beneath them. Problem-based learning is a vehicle for this process.

Facet 2: Interpretation

[analyzing primary and secondary sources from history and building a reasoned story to explain the events of the past]
Students have opportunities to build their own interpretations, translations, and narratives from primary source texts, events, and experiences. The work will need to make clear that interpretation is always problematic, and that multiple interpretations can and do exist. Oral histories, literary analyses, the case method, and Socratic seminars are useful.

Facet 3: Application

[taking the lessons and skills learned and putting them to work in a new context. Hopefully, some of the cognitive and writing exercises that you master will carry over to later classes and circumstances.]
Students have opportunities to apply what they have leaned in the classroom to real or realistic situations. Such activities provide students with experience in planning and troubleshooting. Diverse contexts for these tasks or activities help students realize that theory is not simply plugged in-the particular demands of the situation must be taken into account. Examples include real or simulated tasks, such as those found in odyssey of the Mind, junior Achievement, engineering courses, 4-H, and work to achieve scouting merit badges.

Facet 4: Perspective

[Developing a historical vision in which you see the interconnections of the past, present, and future. Hopefully, you will also come to see your own actions and life in historical perspective and come to a better self-awareness and self-understanding.]
Students have opportunities to take multiple points of view on the same issue. They must develop and use critical thinking skills to determine, on their own, the strengths and weaknesses of the theories, explanations, proofs, and arguments they confront. Thus, the student should regularly confront plausible but incorrect historical narratives, false mathematical proofs, and plausible but outdated scientific theories. Examples include studying the same event through different texts; challenging assumptions, laws, or postulates; and role-play.

Facet 5: Empathy

[Recognizing the commonalities of the human condition. See people of the historical past not as cardboard characters, but coming to recognize our common human links, concerns, foibles, and goals. Again, seeing these elements in the past should also inform the way one lives one's life.]
Students are confronted with types of direct experience designed to develop greater openness and empathy for experiences and worldviews other than their own. ' To broaden student horizons, teachers place students in real or simulated situations, ask them to walk in other people's shoes (or at least take on their views in role-play), and challenge their assumptions. Examples include giving students direct experiences with the ideas in question, and having them re-create different characters as a way of simulating past events and attitudes.

Facet 6: Self-Knowledge

[Employing what the knowledge and understandings that you accumulate about how people have acted in the past to shape a more meaningful, contributing role for yourself in society. Know the past; know thyself.]
The development of self-understanding requires students both to engage in ongoing self-assessment about what they know and how they know it and to make their thinking explicit as they examine the underlying assumptions for their ideas. Making self-assessment and self-adjustment a key part of assessment—not just of instruction—is vital.”

One hopes that with this approach, we tap into greater student creativity, along with enhancing other cognitive skills.