Chapter 9: Planning for learning

We have agreed on the importance of thinking about our students when planning. It is not only contents, skills, and new concepts but also the tools our students need to develop when learning a foreign language. It is essential to think about what students need to learn and not what we want them to learn. Our planning should be engaging and user-friendly, so in this way our students will feel at ease and will be able to follow the lessons in a proper manner.
We cannot forget that that the essence of backward design is asking the following: What kind of instructional approaches, resources and experiences are required to achieve the goals of the desired results we have set?, what are our students’ needs? We are supposed to focus more in learning that in teaching as such.
The author states that a good plan should have two main characteristics; it should be engaging and effective. When we talk about engaging planning, we mean that the design should be provoking, energizing and fascinating for all the students, not for some of them. This is not only related to academic content but also to intellectually compelling and meaningful. It is essential that students enjoy what they do but at the same time centered on big ideas and challenging.
Effective design helps students become more competent and worthy at worthy work, in this way they will go beyond the usual expectations. “The design pays off in substantive, value-added learning…”. In this way students will achieve something of intellectual substance and they will know about it.

Chapter 6: Crafting Understanding

Wiggins (2005) states that there is a difference between understanding and factual knowledge, he mentions that understanding makes a claim using facts and that facts are data. The understanding build up its theory based on interpretations. Dewey (1933) affirmed that a fact requires apprehension, while an understanding requires comprehension. We can see that getting understanding is not easy; in order to achieve this understanding we should help our students asking questions about the facts, connecting them to other facts and try to apply this to different situations and even to their own experiences. Understanding is not given; understanding is the end of a process, a conclusion made using the facts.
Students tend to think in a very concrete way, sometimes they do not go beyond what they are reading or even listening and tend to give concrete answers most of the time repeating the same thing they were exposed to. This is why we should work more on developing a critical thinking again, it is very important for students to make connections, to take into account different possibilities, test diverse theories and to infer.
As teachers we have to be careful since sometimes we tend to ask the wrong questions which at the same time will lead our students in the wrong direction. The author proposes to state understanding as a proposition because in this way students will be able to make inferences on the conclusions we have set.