lunes, 25 de octubre de 2010
Chapter 5 Essential Questions Doorways to Understanding
Forming essential questions is the first step in creating big ideas for a unit according to the UbD model. Essential questions are not the type of questions that offers a quick, direct, right or wrong answer. These questions might create a debate. Essential questions go deeper into our thinking and produce even more, questions full of transfer possibilities. Would a teacher just be interested and focused on teaching dates, and facts or is the teacher who is influenced to use Ubd going to design the unit based on those essential questions if he or she is teaching a History topic? .The UbD trained teacher would use those essential questions to help structure powerful and meaningful lessons for the students. A possible essential question for a unit on the history lesson could be, "What is the cost of freedom?" Clearly in this type of question there is no simple straight forward answer. This kind of questions opens the door for debate and deep thinking and reflexion. This type of question would undoubtedly spark deeper thinking and more questionsl .This is the goal of UbD. Other examples of big ideas mentioned in this chapter would be questions like: What is democracy? What is racism? The chapter gave many examples of essential questions that are specific to a topic, problem, or field of study.
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I agree, and we shouldn't forget that essential questions are not necessarily more difficult, but the ones that promote more debate, dialogue, make students reflect and at the same time help them to develop creative and critical thinking.
ResponderEliminarI share your comment when students can deal with divergent ideas about a topic based on essential questions, so the first thing we have to do is to start giving them more reading activities to improve their opinions and debate.
ResponderEliminarI agree with you in terms of fostering reading. Generating debate is the second task to do, the first is to provide our students with a vast range of vocabulary and it is well known that only through engaging and meaningful texts students are able to succeed in activities like debates and panel discussion.
ResponderEliminarI don't think we can ask those kind of questions to students with a poor level of English, that is to say, at school. We should ask simple "answerable" questions to motivate students and encourage them to use the language. I don't think the ideas in this chapter are useful for us, English teachers at school.
ResponderEliminarNot all schools have a poor English level. I agree with you Estela, we should encourage students to debate and reflect. It is something that seems to be gone lately.
ResponderEliminarI totally agree with Cesar. We feel it is easy because we already have certain level of English, but they are just starting their process. STEP BY STEP.
ResponderEliminarAs you said, questions must have certain characteristic to promote deep thought. They have to be provocative enough to stimulate discussion and spark more questions.
ResponderEliminar