Chapter 6 Crafting Understandings
We start our process of teaching year by year with the same situation: Students do not remember the most they should from the year before... so the question is what is happening with the teaching – learning process? To give some answer to this question Wiggins and McTighe define understanding as follows.
- An understanding is an important inference, drawn from the experience of experts, stated in a specific and useful generalization;
- An understanding refers to transferable, big ideas having enduring value beyond a specific topic;
- An understanding involves abstract, counter-intuitive, and easily misunderstood ideas;
- An understanding is best acquired by "uncovering" and "doing" the subject (i.e., using the ideas in realistic settings and with real-world problems;
- An understanding summarizes important strategic principles in skills area.
According to those points defined above we can understand, in my opinion, that Understanding is a long- term process which attempts to clarify priorities through essential questions and big ideas to challenge our students to develop understanding.
Therefore, work this issue with our students requires to establish which is more worthy for them. The complex topics which should be filtered in order to teach meaningiful contents.
We should carefully consider who our learners are and whether what we call a fact or an understanding really is so to them. The challenge is to help learners be more open-minded to understand the process that they are living.
“When Students are able to understand the purposes why ,what for to learn, and so on, we as teachers can say that our work is made.” I think.
It´s important that you mentioned what is important to us may or may not be important to our students. It´s easy to forget about that sometimes!
ResponderEliminarThat's true, sometimes we tend so hard to make our students feel the same way I feel for learning a foreign language, that we forget their own needs and contexts. It's is very important to help students feel motivated to learn and think critically but at the same time is very important to consider the things that they find interesting and want to include when learning the language.
ResponderEliminar