The project proved to be a formidable challenge for the class. My students were at a significant disadvantage—they were not teachers already familiar with a curriculum and content for specific grades and subjects areas. Consequently, many students had trouble defining a generative topic on which to base the project. Despite holding conferences with students and class discussions about the features of a good topic, some students selected a subject that was too broad (e.g., the American Civil War) or one that did not lend itself to understanding in any viable way (e.g., one student wanted to teach second graders how to make words out of letters). In some of the cases, my students did not have deep understanding of the subject matter themselves, and were unable to formulate ideas about how someone else might develop understanding of the topic. It was also hard for students to develop a series of activities that would build understanding of the topic. Many of the projects simply identified a set of unrelated activities. Due to these kinds of limitations in the final products,  I decided not to evaluate the parts of the projects in great detail. Instead, I focused on how students justified their designs, and examined the extent to which they gave plausible reasons to explain why their approach would enhance understanding. In other words, rather than evaluate the projects directly, I evaluated students' explanations of why they thought their projects would promote understanding.

Students produced several types of explanations. The best developed explanations gave plausible reasons from multiple perspectives to justify their designs. In these cases, they integrated ideas about the nature of understanding with theories of motivation and assessment.

These examples highlight essential features of a well integrated explanation. Only a handful of projects were this well developed. A larger group of students fell back on a single source for reasons to justify their designs, using The teaching for understanding guide as their reference. These answers tended to reiterate text material or give generic reasons to justify the project designs. It was not uncommon for them to say that a particular understanding performance promoted understanding because it involved students in "thought-provoking activity." However, they did not explain what kinds or why certain kinds of thought-provoking activities might lead to understanding.

Still other students gave non-explanatory answers, asserting that their projects would produce understanding because the activities build understanding. In essence, students were saying that the project produces understanding because it follows the TfU steps, which in turn, produce understanding.

A few other students produced idiosyncratic answers that tended to focus on a single dimension of the project. For example, one student claimed that the project would stimulate student interest—and that would account for better understanding.