Saturday, October 23, 2010

Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding

According to Chapter 5, designing and planning start by the use of essentials questions.
Having that idea clear, organization of classes, units and lessons come later.

If we implement essential questions in our classrooms, it will be easier for our 
students to get a clearer understanding our our own lessons, contents and aims.

Essential questions will be beyond the all the matters we have been used to 
dealing with. When we, as learners, tend to question things around us, 
the knowledge we get through it becomes deeper and long-term. 
It is a real truth that questions are a doorway for understanding, 
comprehension and they activate our senses of seeing life in all different 
aspects, such as learning, teaching and so on.

There is nothing wrong when we question things. In fact, we should do 
it all the time, since we will become more critical and confident about 
our own opinions, feelings, ideas and knowledge we are getting.


Questions were made to be answered! Go and look for them!

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Gaining Clarity on Our Goals


Aims in our classes are extremely important when taking a lot of aspects to be reached into account about teaching. Authors give us an understanding of  how to deal with these aims in our teaching practice. Desired goals need to be clear at the moment of starting a lesson plan and help, in one way or another, to do the curriculum for a specific course.

Time has been always an issue to struggle against. As teachers, we may have our plans ready to get them through, and they may work in some lessons, but it is obviously in others will not. Why? Just because the variety of students we have in classes, or because pace is not the same in all our classes or just because we are not in the same mood. We try to cover as much as we can, but we know reality in the classroom is completely different and we have to skip some sections and be careful when choosing what to teach and what not to. We need to set our priorities.

It is really hard how to make that decision. Who decides? Who knows best what is the best for our students? The institution? The teacher? Too many questions to be answered just after reading this chapter.

As the text is concerned, we need to have in mind the three aspects when we set our priorities: worth being familiar with, important to do and to know and big ideas and core tasks.

To finish, I insist we have to be realistic and also flexible. After some experience  teaching, we can decide better.