What’s an essencial question?
This chapter addresses the issue of helping our students understand by using essencial questions. Now, if talking about essencial questions, the first ones that come to my mind are What for? Why do I need to make use of essencial questions in my lessons?. After reading this chapter I tried to follow a sequence in order to answer this questions and came to several interpretations of what essencial questions could do for my lessons. To start, they are a key resource in our lessons, yet not the answer to teachers’ quest for student’s understanding. Our lessons should balance fun activities and thoughtful questions that allow our students to go beyond mere topics or contents.
What do I have to think about when producing essencial questions for my students?
When thinking about questions for tests or to introduce a new topic I think about what I want my students to answer to lead the class to the point I want to get. Nevertheless, essencial questions shouldn’t be conceived with an answer. Furthermore, students are not likely to produce similar answers to essencial questions, since they challenge personal perspectives towards a topic, ability to explore and give it a go to innovative theories. If we think about our informational bakground as a system, then essencial questions lead our students to produce and place “units” in such an accurate way that they are going to enable this system not only to continue working but also to perform new functions.
Are essencial questions applicable to all students?
A question that came to my mind after reading this chapter is what happens with my low-level studens?, since I am sure they have an opinion about different topics yet their level of English would not help them put their ideas into words. Should I just ignore their mistakes to encourage production over form? Should I use these mistakes and start a content analysis from them?
To sum up, what seemed essencial to me to point out is that it is so easy to be tempted by textbook questions which only lead to memory and short-term knowledge that we have a hard battle ahead. It’s up to us to stop and think about innovative ways to introduce a topic, evaluate a lesson, foster new theories, etc, by making use of essencial questions.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Our practices are led by the aim of making our students understand what we want them to, yet what if they don´t?, Does that make us “bad teachers”?, Are we wasting our time with bad students?
What if the content we are teaching can be seen from another perspective?. We usually tend to expect possible answers within certain parametres, yet are never open to the possibility that the answer which goes beyond our set limits might be actually correct.
Since we are defined by our expreiences throughout life, it is quite sensible to accept or at least to consider the fact that understanding is a very particular or personal process. The very same content will make sense at a different level to students who have been through different experiences. Therefore it will be applicable in a different way.
It is at this point where we have to make the right decisions. Moreover, it is at this stage where we can make the most of that “new perspective”, or just castrate any further attempt to give it a go and discover by doing the answer to a question.
Summarising, it seems to me the challenges we are to take today start by fostering our students’ attempts in aswering, even though they happen to be “misunderstandings” according to our perspective. To remove the assumption that what is different from expected is simply wrong and there is nothing to do with it is our second and more challenging task by putting on trial our teaching beliefs.
What if the content we are teaching can be seen from another perspective?. We usually tend to expect possible answers within certain parametres, yet are never open to the possibility that the answer which goes beyond our set limits might be actually correct.
Since we are defined by our expreiences throughout life, it is quite sensible to accept or at least to consider the fact that understanding is a very particular or personal process. The very same content will make sense at a different level to students who have been through different experiences. Therefore it will be applicable in a different way.
It is at this point where we have to make the right decisions. Moreover, it is at this stage where we can make the most of that “new perspective”, or just castrate any further attempt to give it a go and discover by doing the answer to a question.
Summarising, it seems to me the challenges we are to take today start by fostering our students’ attempts in aswering, even though they happen to be “misunderstandings” according to our perspective. To remove the assumption that what is different from expected is simply wrong and there is nothing to do with it is our second and more challenging task by putting on trial our teaching beliefs.
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