Powerful Understanding: Helping Students Explore, Question, and Transform Their Thinking About Themselves and the World Around Them

Teaching requires tireless curiosity—an unwearying commitment to propel learners and learning toward growth through ever deeper and wider understanding. This is the task Grear (2018) takes on in Powerful Understanding: Helping Students Explore, Question, and Transform Their Thinking About Themselves and the World Around Them. To this end, Grear offers a Model for Powerful Understanding, a visual framework for thinking while learners inquire and learn. Each component of the three pronged model is accompanied by an interjection: Explore (“Hmmm…”), Interact (Huh?” and “Develop (Aha!”) and is designed to work with any area of curricular focus. Such familiar interjections are mnemonic devices that enable easy, explicit understanding of the three key concepts of the model. The model is inspired by the current three “core competencies” of British Columbia’s redesigned provincial curriculum: (1) Communication, (2) Thinking, and (3) Personal and Social. Overall, the purpose of the model is to push, animate, and incite critical thinking towards real understanding—the point when “our brains don’t get stuck learning lots of new facts”. (p. 15)

Chapter One provides an introduction, hovers attention on social-emotional learning (e.g., deepening understanding of Self, Others, and the World”, and highlights “Anchor Books” that can be used to activate powerful understanding. Anchor Books are those that should be read for their “underlying theme or message rather than be broken down for teaching specific comprehension strategies” and to teach students “how to think and understand their learning in a more reflective way using the Powerful Understanding Model (pp. 19-21). Included also is a section on How to Use This Book and activity sheets (Reflection, Read-Connect-Reflect, and Read, Think, Connect, Reflect) that may be of use to teachers.

Located in Chapter Two, are detailed “Lessons on Understanding Self” that employ the “explore, interact and develop” components of the model. This 57-page chapter is loaded with comprehensible explanations, anchor texts, and activity sheets to facilitate powerful understanding of the myriad aspects of self-identity. An attention-grabbing lesson is the one on “My Moral Compass”—a worthwhile inclusion.

Lessons on Understanding Others situated in students’ “immediate circle of friendship and community” is the focus of the 41-page Chapter Three. Aimed at strengthening students’ understanding and skills in “[c]reating and maintaining positive relationships with others”, this abundant chapter includes a Friendship Anchor Chart indicating what friendship might look like and sound like, the Friendship Fix Chart” and a bevy of questions and activities to explore, interact, read and connect around the topic of focus. Some important areas centered by Gear are: being friendly, diversity, inclusion, kindness, empathy and community. These are well-supported by the anchor texts and activity sheets that scaffold the topics for users.

Chapter Four comprises hefty “Lessons on Understanding the World”. Gear explains that an “essential goal for teachers in the 21st century is to try help students understand that they are an important part of our global community”. (p. 126) Themes identified to reinforce students deep and powerful understanding of the topic include (Exploitation/Child Labor, Poverty/Homelessness, Immigration/Refugee, Children in War, Segregation/Racism, LBGTQ/Gender Identity, Diversity/Inclusion, and Truth/Reconciliation. Since the list is not an alphabetic one, it is curious that Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) is at the end of the list of themes given its importance to deeply understanding that Indigenous Canadians have experienced severe marginalization and treated as Others to mainstream Canadian society. Nonetheless, the TRC offerings are solid choices.

Interestingly, Gear’s themed list of novels (e.g., “Exploitation and Child Labor”) begins with the world beyond Canada’s borders. Why not highlight the problems that exist here first? Worthy of note, too, is that Grear excludes books about Canada under the theme of Segregation and Racism. Though the list is a respectable one, the exclusion positions teachers and students to look outside Canada for examples of such oppressive practices even though segregation and racism for instance have dominated Canadian society since the advent of colonialism (What of the timeless A Child in Prison Camp by Shizuye Takashima for instance)? This is a pity. That said, Gear’s attention to important topics such as “Global Citizenship, Global Justice, Global Education, Peace, Global Footprint, and Privilege and Poverty” is laudable, and so too are the worksheets included in the chapter. Commendable, too, is the segment on “Reading and Thinking across Canada” which features books recounting “true events and/or people who have played a significant role in the history of our country.”

The book concludes with the author’s inspiring final thoughts, acknowledgments, a list of professional resources, and a handy index. Good stuff indeed!

Powerful Understanding: Helping Students Explore, Question, and Transform Their Thinking About Themselves and the World Around Them is a well-intentioned, practical work whose effectiveness will be largely realized. Nonetheless, the lone White, male child on the cover of a book that gestures towards relational ethics of understanding, self, others and the world is baffling. With that acknowledged, it is difficult to deny that the book is, for the most part, a fine contribution that centers the “thinking part of reading” and merits a place in classrooms, schools, and home libraries in Canada.