6 Facets of Understanding

This week we used the 6 facets of understanding created by Wiggins + McTight to understand how we learned and how we would want our learners to learn.

The 6 Facets:

Explain — provide thorough, supported, and justifiable accounts of phenomena, facts, and data

Interpret — tell meaningful stories; offer apt translations; provide a revealing historical or personal dimension to ideas and events

Apply — effectively use and adapt what we know in diverse contexts

Have Perspective — see and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; see the big picture

Empathize — find value in what others might find odd, alien, or implausible; perceive sen­ sitively on the basis of prior direct experience

Have Knowledge — perceive the personal style, prejudices, projections, and habits of mind that both shape and impede our own understand­ ing; we are aware of what we do not understand and why understanding is so hard

Initially, it was difficult for me to not look at the facets as levels and the “Have Knowledge” was the final level to strive for. Even in the reading it states that they should be considered different connotations of learning and that they should be seen as different, but related views on learning. One could transition through the facets of education like stages , but the stages can be rearranged or gone back to for deeper understanding.

For the first activity in which we came up with examples of ways that we learned in each of the facets, we tried to come up with examples within different learning subjects (art, science, English/literature, history, design) so that we wouldn’t get stuck in thinking about learning in a generic way. We came up with interesting ideas such as socratic seminars, analyzing art, creative writing, pen pals, etc. from thinking about the different things we learn.

In the second activity, we applied the 6 facets to what our learners could learn at each stage in relation to systems thinking. I think that overall our group might need to start getting more specific in regards to what systems thinking is. Similarly to our first board where we tried to diversify our answers by thinking about different subjects, I think that we need to diversify our answers for systems thinking. A lot of our answers for this exercise were similar to answers we had for the previous 4MAT mapping. We noted that we got through this exercise quickly and although it was good to have this out of the way, I think that it may indicate that we should’ve looked deeper into systems thinking and how it is learned. Both Patricia and I have participated in multiple courses on systems thinking and design researching within the past few years, so we should have a good understanding of how we learned about systems, what worked and what didn’t, and how that could be integrated into high school education.

I think that because systems thinking is so broad and there are so many things that could be considered a system that would be learned/understood and designed for differently, it is difficult for us to think about the specifics of our learning experience since we don’t want to leave anything out.

The facet that we hadn’t touched on in previous activities was “Have-Self Knowledge.” I think our group hadn’t thought about how we learn through reflection which is very funny because we’ve been doing it through our medium posts! I think that reflection and revision are something that would be very important for us to include in our learning experience because there really aren’t any real/complete solutions to systems/wicked problems and it would be important for students to look at areas where they could improve their idea or think about what they designed situated in the system now that it is complete.

I think that the 6 Facets are something that we will have to go back to later in order to further our idea. We definitely need to fill up the empathize category more or think about how one could learn empathy/become more empathetic through learning because empathy is the driving force behind solving systems problems. Looking at which categories are fuller than others should help us to figure out what we already know about learning our material and what we still need to to learn more about.