UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
Grant Wiggins and Jay Mc Tighe
Chapter 5
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS:
DOORWAYS TO UNDERSTANDING
Grant Wiggins and Jay Mc Tighe
Chapter 5
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS:
DOORWAYS TO UNDERSTANDING
“…through provocative questions, students deepen their understanding”
We teachers are always asking questions and looking for “the correct answer”. We always use factual questions where our students evince that they really know that important answer. Nevertheless, it is really important to consider that we are not only looking for the evidence of that “knowing”, but also we are looking for evidence of real “thinking”. Probably some questions are essential in my role as a teacher, but it must be clear that we teacher also have to provide essential questions to anyone as a “thinking person”. Therefore, through these essential questions we may help our students to stimulate their thinking. Asking essential questions as a way of organizing content also serves to strengthen students' sense of their own authority over the content and to deepen their real understanding on a specific content and to motivate and encourage students’ inquiry. And if we consider Bloom’s taxonomy, these essential questions reside at the top as the students not only have to understand, but also have to analyze, evaluate and create.
“What makes a question essential?”
But how we teachers can realize what makes essential one question; what makes the difference between one question to another. Well, there are some important clues we should consider when looking for these essential questions and when answering them. First of all, these questions should offer “transferability” across disciplines; they should cause genuine and relevant inquiry into the big ideas and core content; they should provoke deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and new understanding; they must require students to consider options, concrete and/or real evidence; they must stimulate “rethinking”; they must spark connections between previous learning and personal experiences. Thus, the essential questions “frame the goals”.
But how we teachers can realize what makes essential one question; what makes the difference between one question to another. Well, there are some important clues we should consider when looking for these essential questions and when answering them. First of all, these questions should offer “transferability” across disciplines; they should cause genuine and relevant inquiry into the big ideas and core content; they should provoke deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and new understanding; they must require students to consider options, concrete and/or real evidence; they must stimulate “rethinking”; they must spark connections between previous learning and personal experiences. Thus, the essential questions “frame the goals”.
“Overarching questions”
To round off, I can conclude that it is “essential” to use not only factual or “topical” questions which focus mainly on the content of a topic, but also overarching questions, which are framed around “truly big ideas”. These overarching and essential questions focus on learning content for understanding; therefore we teachers may clearly develop critical thinking on our students.
ANGELINA
ReplyDeleteI agree with your last point, though we first need to ask ourselves "overarching" questions about ourselves as teachers and about our deep beliefs. I think it's not that easy and just say, "let's create nice questions that make our students think". After reading your reflection and some of the rest of the class, I gradually convince myself that making this type of questions are really hard to develop and to produce. It's not a matter of setting a topic and just come up with a set of them. The saddest thing is that there are lots of teachers who think they are doing a correct job, not only in their everyday activities, but also in the way they see education, students, methodology and so on. We haven't been trained to think critically unfortunately, and to start reversing this process is going to take, hopefully not, a long time. One may think that making questions is as simple as placing question marks at either extreme of the sentence and using an auxiliary. We really lack this training in such a basic, or apparently basic, instrument that we work on every day, a question. Once we have our ideas clear, first of all, we can start thinking about how to analyse and device these complex instruments so as to foster all this critical thinking we long for.
XXX
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAngelina,
ReplyDeleteSorry about the previous message but i don't know why just half of it was published and it didn't make much sense.Here it goes again, complete.
Spark....I was thinking about that metaphor of "sparking" things in the minds of our students.
We need to be the sparking match then, and one way or another, we have to transform the minds of our children into something flammable.
Essential questions will help us, and also our own process of assimiliation of giving our power away.
What we really need to make our students engage with our questions is to make them feel that we are asking not for the sake of it, but because we really CARE about their answers.
That is why this chapter is pretty valuable, it helps us to ask THAT kind of questions, real ones and intelligent ones sparking critical thinking in our students minds.
Rethorical questions the, or the ones that are so obvious that make students feel stupid must be left behind.
Thank you!
Vicky
Angelina
ReplyDeleteCritical thinking and Essential questions share the same goal: understanding. Regrettably, there are many barriers which do not allow this goal to be possible. Some students fear to ask, they are dependent on the teacher, they lack confidence and they are unable to concentrate and to think. In order to finish with these barriers, it is indispensable that teachers change participation practices gradually, encourage active participation and relevant uses of English and recognize thoughtful and creative contributions.
There is a proverb which might help students to improve their critical thinking skills: The person who asks a question is a fool for five minutes but the person who does not ask questions remain a fool forever.
Angelina,
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with idea of asking not only topical questions but also overarching ones which aim at the big and abstract ideas. In fact, this is a worring issue in our students nowadays. In order to produce a critical thinking generation, we have start as early as possible, as from 5th or 6th graders. Although it is a long-term effort, it will result after some years in a rewarding objective: Critical thinking students.
Hi Angelina!
ReplyDeleteYou comment on essential questions seem to clearly summarize the core of this chapter. To have such provocative questions in our lessons which will encourage deeper meditation over a number of topics. The idea of not just restricting our lessons to the coverage of contents, but to real understanding and transferability of such content should be the main purpose; in other words, give our students the power to see, and analize the implication of the matters discussed in class.
Hi Angelina!
ReplyDeleteThe first point you mentioned called my attention, since we are underestimating our students by asking questions with "the" answer in our minds. We intend to check our students' understanding, yet our questions point at a different outcome.
How do we expect our students to understand if we do not encourage them with challenging questions and tasks?
I agree with you on the descriptions you say. Everything seems to be clear. But now, we know what is going on inside the classrooms, a couple of ideas have come to mi mind; (i) How can we take this theory into practice? Because in the article we find a description of the problem and possible solutions; however, I wonder why teachers prefer topical questions and not the essential ones. (ii) I have two different courses, one of literature and one of grammar. Since I read the article I have been thinking on how to "transfer" the information from the article to my grammar class, where fixed-factual questions are asked and correct-factual answers are given. It is easier to me to ask essential questions in such an open course as literature, but the former is a real issue... (iii) The last idea concerns teacher training; Our case is unique, we are lucky to read about these issues whereas there some other teachers (and others who are not even teachers)who do not know what an essential question is, they do not anything about critical thinking and even worse they do not care about learning. So the question is... How can we fight against a mediocre system?
ReplyDeleteGreetings!
You are right when you say that most of the questions that teachers make look for a sole and obvious answer, easily extracted from a text or whatever piece of writing what does not allow students to go beyond the information given. Actually our practices as teachers are not focused on motivating the capacities of transfer and inquiry in order to get understanding; moreover I consider that teachers are not aware about the role that they should play to improve the quality of Chilean education.
ReplyDelete