Making Meaning Together: Comprehension, Competency, and Collation
Once learners enter the dialogic space, the discovery process matures from inquiry to meaning-making. How do we make sense of what we hear, do, and discover together? The hallmarks of this stage are comprehension, competency, and collation. Comprehension is the ability to grasp, reflect on, and integrate meaning in real-time. Competency moves meaning beyond the theoretical grasp into performance and modeling, towards learning that lives in action. Collation makes coherence possible, turning the nonlinear messiness of dialogue into a structured understanding. These habits are interwoven movements rather than sequential steps in the shared project of understanding. Together, they keep dialogue anchored in depth, not drift.
Comprehension.
At its core, dialogic learning still depends on understanding the content at hand. Comprehension is the ability to grasp the meaning of ideas. It involves parsing the “grammar and logic” of a concept and seeing how it fits into a broader context. In conversation, this skill manifests as being able to follow others’ arguments, interpret texts or information accurately, and discern the key points in a discussion. It involves active understanding. The learner can summarize what they’ve heard, identify underlying assumptions, and integrate new information into what they already know. Without comprehension, dialogue becomes empty chatter or miscommunication. Thus, mastering comprehension involves reading and listening carefully as a baseline, with reflecting, questioning, clarifying, summarizing, proposing, and more as higher-order sub-skills: “Do I really get this? Can I explain it in my own words?” In a way, every good conversation is a mini-test of understanding. We often realize what we know or do not by attempting to discuss it. Accordingly, the dialogic learner continuously sharpens their comprehension skills to keep up with the conversation and further develop it.
Competency.
This refers to the practical skill aspect of learning. In any domain, be it math, writing, woodwork, or music, competency means being able to perform tasks and apply knowledge at a proficient level (or better). How is this relevant to dialogue? When learners “learn out loud,” they do more than trade abstract ideas. They often mentor each other in skills and demonstrate know-how. For example, in a collaborative science project, one learner might show others how to set up an experiment, which is a display of competency that others can emulate. Or during a peer editing session in writing class, learners with stronger writing skills can model how to craft a sentence. The point is that competency is built through practice, feedback, and refinement. It is essentially the performance side of learning. A master dialogic learner talks about their ideas, of course, but they also execute and exemplify those ideas. Moreover, they use dialogue (asking for help and offering tips) as a tool to achieve higher competency. In a community of minds, everyone’s competencies can rise through the shared efforts and exchange of expertise. The shared goal is to continuously improve at the tasks or workflows of learning, ideally reaching or even exceeding expected benchmarks through iterative dialogue and practice.
Collation.
In an information-rich age, a learner must be skilled at organizing knowledge. Another word for that is collation. It involves gathering information from various sources and organizing it in a meaningful way. Think of collation as the ability to make sense of a barrage of ideas. A dialogic learner might hear multiple viewpoints in a discussion and then mentally (or literally) categorize or sequence those perspectives. It is like being your own librarian or editor, in that you must manage and structure the knowledge you are accumulating. This skill is vital when learning with others because conversations can be wide-ranging and nonlinear. A learner strong in collation can say, “So far we have talked about X, Y, and Z. Here is how they connect.” They can create coherence from the exchange. Collation also means keeping track of what has been learned. It involves taking notes, mapping concepts, and distinguishing main ideas from examples. By doing so, learners can ensure that valuable insights from dialogue are not lost in the air. They are instead integrated into an evolving knowledge framework. In practical terms, collation might look like a study group’s whiteboard filled with a concept map after a discussion, or a learner’s journal where they regularly summarize what they have learned each week. It is an often unsung skill, but it turns conversational learning from a transient experience into a structured body of knowledge that a learner can build on.
Shared inquiry cannot thrive without shared understanding. Comprehension, competency, and collation ensure that dialogue moves beyond talk — into grasp, practice, and structure. These habits enable learners to trace meaning through action, to learn from each other’s fluency, and to hold knowledge in ways that others can join. As learners map ideas, demonstrate skill, and make sense of the whole, they come to see that learning is not something delivered. It is something built — together, in motion, and in words. The deeper the dialogue, the more durable the understanding.
