Chapter II: Understanding Understanding

Every teacher has asked him/herself, at least once in their lives, How do I know my students undestood the content? We know that it is a hard task because understanding is a mental process, so we cannot see it from outside. In this chapter, the author describes undestanding in two ways: "mental construct, an abstraction made by the human mind to make sense of the many distinct pieces of knowledge.", "To understand is to have done it in the right way, often reflected in being able to explain why a particular skill, approach, or body of knowledge is or is not appropriate in a paticular situation.", and "To understand a topic or subject is to be able to use [...] knowledge and skill wisely and effectively." Knowing this, we can say that understanding requires using mental processes, explanations, knowledges, and usage of them. Acoording to the author, it "requires ability to self-assess, justify, and critique doings." An important charactteristic mentioned in the book is that understanding let people use knowledge flexibly transfering it to different situations, being able to adapt knowledge to them. From my point of view, we, teachers, do not need to ask students to define a concept to make sure they understood the topic. On the contrary, I strongly believe that their production and adaptation of the knowledge they have can be expressed in different ways, keeping in mind that it will depend on their learning styles and types of intelligences.