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.
Hi Maca!
ReplyDeleteStepping back, that is the task for us.
We have to allow students to think and to express their thoughts.If we are always there, pushing them to answer what we want them to answer, then, what can we expect.....
It's difficult to throw the ball, but we have to.
Of course there is a balance, a too student centered makes the teacher redundant, and a too teacher centered transforms our children into robots.
Thanks,
Vicky
Macarena
ReplyDeleteStimulating critical thinking skills is one of the most important goals in education. This art of thinking about your thinking while you are thinking makes your ideas more clear, precise, accurate, relevant, consistent and fair. Observations, facts, inferences, assumptions, opinions, arguments and critical analysis are essential elements of critical thinking and play a very important role in achieving an effective learning. Our task as teachers is to reflect on whether we are encouraging our students to use these elements and how often they are using them in the classroom.
I loved the following quotation that you used: “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 sufficiency”.
In this respect, critical thinking prepares students to educate themselves for the rest of their life.
Dear Macarena,
ReplyDelete"Our students need a curriculum that treats them more like potential performers than sideline observers".
I find the quotation above quite revealing. In fact, many teachers may regard their students as mere and passive observers. In other words, we should give more credit to our students and trust they could become critical thinking students.
The idea that we should treat them as potential performers stresses the fact that a student-centered approach is being demanded.
It is our responsability to encourage our students to participate in our lessons either individually, in pairs or in groups.
Inevitably, by giving students the chance to collaborate with the teacher, they could become more leading individuals in the classroom. Later, the process of essential questions will take place. Inexorably too, they will consider as natural to elaborate questions and answer the overarching ones, for example. It is a matter of time and patience. The goal of making our students critical thinkers cannot achieved overnight.
“Our students need a curriculum that treats them more like potential performers than sideline observers”
ReplyDeleteI think this is a fundamental point in education. The curriculum should states that students must be active participants in the learning process, they have to develop critical thinking, express themselves and be curious about the topics they are learning.
However, as we all know, this is something thet is not even mentioned in the National Curriculum. Therefore I think is our task to include essential questions in our lesson planning to produce a real change in education.
Hi Macarena!
ReplyDeleteAfter all the discussion, it seems that one of the challenges is to try and make our students understand that studying is not just learning the right answer, but learning to learn. However, it seems quite difficult to make our students realize of the importance of that goal. It looks absolutely easier foe them just to store a set of correct answers, but learning to learn and to go deeper into a discussion implies an extra effort, pulling yourself one step forward, a step that kids are not always willing to take.