Specify the particular achievement each facet reflects.

MATURE understanding has been described as a 6-sided view of the concept of understanding.

Explain - provide throrough, supported and justifiable accounts of phenomena, facts & data

Interpret - tell meaningful stories; offer apt translations; provide a revealing historical or personal dimension to ideas and events; make it personal or accessible through images, anecdotes, analogies, and models.

Apply - effectively use and adapt what we know in diverse contexts.

Persepective - see and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; seeing the "big picture"

Empathize - find value in what others might find odd, alien, or implausible; perceive sensitively on the basis of prior direct experience.

Self-knowledge - perceive the personal style, prejudices,projections, and habits of mind that shape and impede our own understanding.

All 3 criteria need to be met, yet each is different from and independent of the other two.

Writing may be clear but unpersuasive; it might be well organized but unclear and somewhat persuasive.

Understanding is a family of related abilities.

Students may have a through and sophisticated explanation but not be able to apply it. Or see things from a critical distance, but lack empathy.

A complete and mature understanding ideally involves the full development of all six kinds of understanding.

Why is that so?
What explains such events?
What accounts for such action?
How can we prove it?
To what is this connected?
How does this work?
What is implied?

Understanding revealed through performances and products that clearly, thrououghly, and instructively explain how things work, what they imply, where they connect and why they happened.

Because the student with the most in-depth understanding in this sense both sees and explains diverse data more precisely and grasps subtle aspects of ideas or experiences, and since they can give understanding evidence that is described by teachers as thorough, nuanced, or thoughtfully qualified as opposed to glib, sweeping or grandiose theorizing.

How do survivors of the Holocaust and WWII make sense of world events today?

How do we make sense of today in light of 9/11?

Why is a 7th graders' viewpoint different?
(They were only 1 year old on 9/11/01)

My 4th graders hardly know anything about the day.

The act of interpretation is clearly more fraught with ambiguity than the act of theory building and testing.

Regardless of author intent, texts can have unintended meanings and significance.

"Narratives and their interpretations traffic in meanings, and meanings are intransigently multiple." Bruner (1996)

A theory must be true to work.
A story only needs to illuminate, engage, and have verisimilitude.

3 versions of a theory is "intellectually unacceptable."

But the interpretations of a story, experience and human event is not only plausible, but expected and anticipated.

NOT the plug-in and fill-in pseaudoapplication we find today in education. :-(

We show our understanding of something by using it, adapting it, and customizing it.

Application comes as we are able to negotiate different constraints, social contexts, purposes, and audiences, understanding is revealed as performance know-how, the ability to accomplish tasks successfully, with grace under pressure, and with tact. (p. 52)

Empathy is a LEARNED ability to grasp the world from someone else's point of view.

Using one's imagination to see and feel as others see and feel.

DIFFERENT from seeing in perspecvie, which is to see from a CRITICAL distance. (detaching ourselves to see more objectively.)

Search out Inevitable Blind Spots beneath habits, naive confdence, strong beliefs and world views.