Ironically enough, I initially found this article very difficult to (you guessed it!) understand... and I guess I should say understand easily. I ended up reading many sentences twice to try and make sure I was comprehending what the author was trying to say. In spite of this, by the end of the article, I found the overarching message to be important. We must teach beyond the facts and require students to gain insight and perspective into the topics that we teach to acquire true understanding.
To do this, teachers must make an effort to understand how and if students are taking in the information we are supplying them, beyond the facts. The author suggests we do this by detecting what students are "seeing" and "not seeing" about that topic, and assisting them past any obstacles. This will likely be a more difficult challenge than it sounds like due to the number of students in your classroom, the limited amount of time you have in a school year and the identification of each student's hurdles to true understanding. The author mentions that this balancing act is more like an art, and I can see why!
It would be easy to say that a student "understands" a topic based on their retelling the correct facts or acing a multiple choice test, but that it not where our job stops. We should make our best effort to teach the insight towards what makes the facts true, and it's different perspectives. Not only would this step be a challenge for teachers, but also a challenge for students to own that 'step further' into true understanding. They might not have been previously given the resources or confidence to dig that deep into "understanding", thinking that knowing the facts is enough. Here again, it is our job to incorporate those thought provoking questions and healthy debate into each lesson, so that students naturally take that leap into true understanding and insight.
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