Chapter 5 Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding

According to what we have read, there are fundamental aspects to consider when designing a lesson plan; we have mentioned objectives, strategies, priorities and no it's time to talk about essential questions in order to promote our students understanding. As the author states, essential questions lead to more questions and at the same time they lead to deeper understanding.
Questions shouldn't be so global, best questions are the ones which engage students, the ones students consider relevant and the ones that promote connections and give the curriculum a coherence and consistency. Many times we ask the typical questions that do not promote a deeper thinking or a deeper comprehension.
After reading this chapter, I realize that if we use the correct questions and think more about we really want to get from our students, we will be able to promote critical thinking and a real comprehension not only related to reading skills but to all the skills.
This chapter is also very interesting since it provides us with some tips that will help when generating essential questions and one of the most important things is to make questions that we really want our students to answer, problems to solve or to investigate about.
Finally I would like to say that if we start working with this type of questions in our own classrooms, we will help our students develop more vocabulary, more self confidence and a more holistic view about the world. We must not forget how important it is to help students have clear goals and understand the material they are working with. Having a purpose is fundamental and develop a critical thinking will be useful not only during school years but also when working or facing different situations in life.

Chapter 3: Gaining clarity on our goals

This chapter reminds us that objectives and stating clear desired results are fundamental when planning our lessons, due to the fact that are many aims that that have an important role when teaching, in this case a foreign language. Of course we are not going to have just one goal, but many; the important thing is to know how to set clear objectives, to have priorities and make choices on what are we going to teach and how are we going to do it.
One of our responsibilities as teachers is to be creative and flexible. We need in some cases to adapt our lessons to our own students’ needs and learning styles. Of course this is not easy, sometimes we have many hours teaching per week and we do not have enough time to plan in a proper way, and we don’t have the time to think about every single student we have. Sometimes a lesson seems to be very good, it looks like students are learning and that at the same time they are enjoying what they are learning, but we do not have clear priorities so at the end we stop and think: “yes, this is what I wanted them to get from the class”.
After being teaching for a while, I can say that I’m able to think and plan beforehand what goals my students are supposed to achieve and what is the best way for them to do it.
It is essential to think about the contents, sometimes there is an impressive amount of things we want to teach, but it is fundamental to set priorities and make choices around assessments, assignments, tasks and teaching strategies. The best teacher is not the one who teaches lots of contents but the one who thinks about their students’ needs and who cares for their learning.
In order to set clear priorities it could be very useful to think about what is worth being familiar with, what is important to know and do and what are the big ideas and core tasks. Once we have set clear goals and priorities, our teaching will be more engaging and will cause and impact on our student, which is in many cases, what we want to achieve at the end.