Doorways to understanding

What kind of questions should we ask?

According to the text they should be “essential questions”. According to the author, essential questions are those which point to and highlight the big ideas, they encourage students to explore the key concepts, themes, theories, issues of the unit. These questions consider certain common characteristics and they should mean to the following: 1-. Cause genuine and relevant inquiry. 2-. Provoke deep thought, discussion and new understanding, as well as more questions. 3-. Require student to support their answers and ideas. 4-. Stimulate rethinking of big ideas. 6-. Opportunities for transfer to other subjects.

                Moreover, the chapter proposes that questions can be seen as “topical” or “overarching”, the former refers to specific topical understanding within a unit and the latter to questions which point beyond the topic content.  It is important to consider all these elements when teaching instead of only focusing on contents. According to my experience sometimes I tend to ask questions focused on knowledge instead of considering other aspects.

Know or Understand?

                 I know how to fix my car but I do not really understand how to fix it.

                               Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design, 2005, p. 35

Chapter two identifies two different but interrelated terms. People usually use “know” and “understand” as similar words but although they can be confused both suggest different ideas. While knowing deals with the facts, verifiable claims, a coherent body of ideas, understanding implies the meaning of facts, the theory beyond this, the understanding of why it is. After reading this chapter I realized how important are these terms when analyzing the objectives we propose when teaching English as a foreign language, What do we expect from our students?, Should students know or understand?. According to my point of view I should expect students to take what they learned in a lesson and be able to apply it to other situations. According to the author this is called transfer. In education, students should be able to transfer learning to many other setting using the tools given by us.

I cannot stop thinking in real life situations that represents the idea of this chapter.  My mom loves cooking and she does not need a recipe to prepare something, she understand how to do it and if anything goes wrong she understands the reason and can fix it. This is because she understands the theory that provides coherence and meaning to cooking.

      Baking without an understanding of the ingredients and how they work is like baking

      blindfold(ed)…sometimes everything works. But when it doesn´t you have to guess at

      how to change it.

                Rose Levy Berenbaum, The Cake Bible, 1988, p. 469.