Understanding by Design

In order to make a critical discussion of the chapter 2 “Understanding Understanding” from the Book “Understanding by Design” by Wiggins & Mctighe, we have to look at 3 different but connected ideas that the chapter gives us.

First, we have to look and examine the concept of understanding. The discussion starts, paradoxically, on the lack of understanding of this concept. According to the authors this concept is frequently misunderstood or confounded with the idea of Knowledge. This misinterpretations, which are made by teachers and people regarding to the area of Education, have undesirable consequences when assessment appears. That is to say that at the moment of testing is important to know if this process has a connection with the content knowledge or skills that should be tested (Validity). So, the assessment a teacher does is going to depend on the understanding he or she has from the concepts of Understanding and Knowledge.

Now, it is important to define these two concepts. From Understanding, what we obtain is the abstraction, the mental process that human minds do in order to “get the idea”, to understand and give meaning and sense to different and connected parts of knowledge. At the same time, Understanding has to do with knowing something and being capable of use that knowledge so that he or she is able to use that information for certain things.
On the other hand, Knowledge is defined by the facts and information we obtain from a subject or experience.


Second, we have another idea exposed by the authors which is Transferability. I personally agree on the idea that this concept gives clear description of how understanding and knowledge work. Transferability acts as one of the main mental abilities at the moment of solving a “X” Problem from daily life. That is to say, if students are learning by content knowledge and are capable of understand it and able to use that knowledge to any other different situation, here we have that the idea of transferability takes place as a normal mental operation. And I think this ability is the expected outcome from any subject or study. I remember the question “why do we have to learn math?” and this concept and ability shows us how we act and operate from our inner mental processes, most of the time without knowing it.

Third, the idea of students' misunderstanding as a way of learning. Why? Because although students have learnt something wrongly, teachers have the opportunity to fix that wrong ability. This idea also connects with transferability because you have to do that kind of operation using knowledge and processing it by transfer in order to do misunderstanding. So, in that case it is the teacher’s chance to go to that wrong operation and rebuilt it.