Esssential Questions:
Doorways to Understanding

“These are questions which are not answerable with finality in a brief sentence”
“Such questions when properly used, thus send all the right signals about understanding as a goal”.

According to the reading, the objective to be achieved through Essential Questions is to provoke critical thinking in our students, so they will be stimulated to come up with more questions exploring and allowing in that way the transfer process.
As I see, we must develop in our students higher abilities to face problem-solving and understanding in different settings. In fact , essential questions deal with the upper levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
We must teach our student that “education is not just about learning ‘the answer’ but about learning how to learn” (p.108)


“A teacher’ s job is not merely to teach a set of simple skills. Her job is to teach certain skills in order to develop self suffiency”.

One of the challenges we face as classroom teachers is learning to use Essential Questions to guide our students' learning experiences. Creating Essential Questions that truly give a student the opportunity to engage in the learning process is a difficult endeavor. The author has a great list of tips for using essential questions on p. 121, but one idea calls my attention. “Help students to personalize the questions. Have them share examples, personal stories, and hunches. Encourage them to bring in clippings and artifacts to help make the questions come alive” (p. 121). From my point of view, we should take into account purpose and value, strategy and tactics, and context of use of the Essential Questions provided.



“Our students need a curriculum that treats them more like potential performers than sideline observers”.

Our student aren’t really often asked to participate in it, to use what they know or think about what they’re learning beyond regurgitating for a test! I really think we have to make our classes challenging in order to make our students think about things in new ways. What we need to do, then, is step back and see whether we have created a class based on “an unending stream of leading questions” (p.122).We sometimes send students the message that getting through the content is more important than their own questions. We have trained students that not to know something and be curious about it is risky but we have to give them the possibility to go beyond the knowledge level of learning and react to thought-provoking questions in order to stimulate discussion, debate, dissent, and research.

What does “understand” something really mean?

I want to examine the issue of understanding as complex phenomena and as a different matter of knowing any particular subject.

Reading about how to play an instrument doesn’t mean you then know how to play the instrument. So what does it mean to understand something? This is a difficult question, and I am not particularly confident of my answer to it. But I can give my view on it according to the reading “Understanding understanding”. It seems to me that understanding something means "seeing" or having insight into how it "works", and that what one knows describes part of that insight, but more importantly, it derives from that insight. This means when teachers are trying to teach a topic for understanding, they need to do more than to try to get students to learn particular propositions. They need to try to get students to have the insights and perspectives those propositions try to convey and from which they derive. That is a more difficult task in many cases than is simply getting students to memorize or know a set of particular statements. I dare to say that it is an art, and it takes methods for discovering what students are both "seeing" and not "seeing" about the subject. To achieve this goal, teachers must try to unleash the student's powers of insight or to focus it on some aspect of the phenomena that is causing the stumbling block. Strategies to teach understanding to individuals work when the teacher says or does enough different things in teaching so that each student's power of understanding will be fostered. For instance, a good lesson can stimulate thinking and focus it in particular ways. Therefore, teaching for understanding, it is the focused stimulation of thinking that is important. According to this, my feeling is that understanding some subject means you know and apply some information becoming meaningful, i.e people have to learn in order to understand.

In summary, to get the understanding as we teachers want, we need to put understanding up front our lessons. And that means putting thoughtful engagement in performances of understanding up front!.