• Introduction
• Definitions
• A Problem I Could Live With
• Understanding and Mastery
• The Inverted Pyramid
• Benchmark Understanding
• Against the Grain
• References
  and Acknowledgments
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 1998-99 by Randy Bass (bassr@gusun.georgetown.edu)   The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

Section Three:
Understanding and Mastery

This point was most driven home to me as I reflected on what I knew and didn’t know about how students developed what Howard Gardner calls a "deep understanding" of my subject. Looking at my discipline through my own eyes only, I assumed that "understanding" was equivalent and coextensive with mastery. I assumed that students in a particular course achieved understanding (in the space of a semester) by replicating a partial and incomplete version of mastery (a mimicry of mastery) that was like the understanding that developed across a whole course of study. Upper division majors were just farther along in this journey of mastery, with the depth of their mimicry ever more convincing. Either way, I imagined that every student, freshman or senior, major or not, was engaged in some version of the mastery of knowledge model that in its completeness was designed primarily to produce English teachers.

It was only by "virtue" of my crisis that led to a reconstruction that I found myself looking critically at this model for the first time. For example, I realized I didn’t know really if the better students in a course who demonstrated a real understanding of the material by the end of the semester were actually acquiring that understanding in my course, or were merely the percentage of students who entered the course with a high level of background and aptitude. Similarly, I realized I didn’t really know if the students who I watched "improve" from their early work to later work were really understanding the material and the paradigm from which I was operating, or merely learning to perform their knowledge in ways that had adapted to my expectations. (Or, for that matter, I wasn’t sure if there was any meaningful difference between understanding and performing understanding; or as Tom Hatch, a scholar at the Carnegie Foundation is always asking, I didn’t know if "understanding" was the most important learning goal at all times anyway).

As the "crisis" part of this story resolved, I turned to the task of documenting what I had learned in a "course portfolio." When I focused on the process of recording and framing what was happening in my courses, I was struck by the thinness of resources on which I could draw for help in analyzing the nature of learning in my discipline. I realize now that the gaping quality of my questions was rooted in both the nature of teaching itself and the culture of the academy. Grant Wiggins puts it well in an essay, entitled "Embracing Accountability":

Teaching, by nature, is an egocentric profession in the sense Piaget used the term: we find it difficult to see when our teaching isn’t clear or adequate. We don’t easily imagine how what is so obvious and important to us cannot be equally so to novices. Combined with our strong desire to cause learning and to find any evidence of success, we are prone to unending self-deception. How easily we hear what we want and need to hear in a student answer or question; how quickly we assume that if a few intelligent comments are made, all students get the point. This is the tragic flaw inherent in trying hard, and for the right reasons, to get people to understand and value what we understand and value. It then often doesn’t occur to us that students are trying equally hard to appear knowledgeable (5).

My journey that had begun with a crisis had progressed to a problem, in fact a set of problems. The ending had become a new beginning where the broad set of questions that had been raised in the process of rethinking my courses were now coming into focus as clear lines of inquiry that I wanted to investigate over the next several years, in the context of my teaching. My objectives in this investigation do not replace my interest in teaching well (and better), and to make each semester’s experience for students worthwhile; but I also want to look at a set of questions over time, both for my own professional development and as a contribution to the scholarship of teaching in my field.

Next Section: The Inverted Pyramid

Previous Section:A Problem I Could Live With