Chapter 5: Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding (Wiggins & McTighe)

In chapter 5, Wiggins and McTighe focused on the importance of questions in order to organize their planning. By this I mean that teachers must add fundamental questions in the lessons they design and always aiming to the desired goals of the class. The questions must be a way to make students understand a lesson and encourage them to think critically.
First of all teachers must be aware of the importance of questioning and its relationship with understanding. According to the chapter, those questions “aim to stimulate thought, to provoke inquiry, and to spark more questions”(106), which means that questioning is important for the stimulation of students’ critical thinking and the development of judgement.
Questions must be oriented to the most important ideas of the content of the lesson. “ They serve as doorways through which learners explore the key concepts, themes, theories, issues, and problems that reside within the content [...]" (106). By this I mean, the questions must be the way to lead students to comprehend the most important points of a lesson and encourage them to reflect on the topic oh what they are learning in the class. Questions also need to catch students attention if we want students to feel motivated in answering them.
Finally teachers should think about what makes questions essential for the teacheing and learning process. A essential question must not be general, but it needs to be specific and oriented to the heart of a particular topic, problem or field. What is important is that those essential questions is that students can apply them in real context.

In conclusion, the objective of questions is to encourage learners to use their critical thinking to answer those questions, which will give the evidence that they understand the lessons. Teachers must consider questions as the key of the learning process which lead students to ask more important questions for a real context.

Wiggins, Grant –McTighe, Jay. “Understanding by Design”. Chapter 5: Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding. (2005)

Chapter 1: Backward Design (By Wiggins & McTighe)

In the chapter 1 of the book “Understanding by design”, Wiggins and McTighe explains what teachers need to design a lesson. Designing a class is more complex as teachers think, because planning a lesson does not imply that be a joyful one, but it need to be meaningful and coneccted to the content and the purpose of the class.

First of all teachers need to realize that lessons have to have a meaningful purpose that has to be connected to what students need. Before the lesson starts, teachers need to organize what they are going to teach to the whole class, that process is called backward design which is important to have a more effective learning process.

Moreover, teachers have to set the design into different stages. First of all teachers need to identify the target results, which relates what teachers want students to perform from a lesson. Apart from doing a lesson without planning it, most of teachers fail in teaching a lesson when they do not have clear what are the desire results. Then teachers need to have evidence of whether learners achieve to understant what they have learned. For this, teachers have to collect information, such as tests, quizzes or exams, in order to identify and judge learners’ performance. Finally, teachers have to focus on the planning of each class and revise what students have learned and understood by make them do activities that will show such evidence. Those stages are important in order to fullfil the desired objectives in the learning process.

The most important issue is to emphazise the importance of backward design in the learning process. It is important to increase students knowledge and make learning more effective for children. This can be possible if teachers focus their attention in the purpose of the lessons or activities that need to be connected to students’ need. Having all these concept clear the expectations of the teacher will increase and students will learn more.

Chapter 8 :Criteria & Validity (by Wiggins and McTighe)

In this chapter, Wiggins and McTighe explain how important is for teachers to use criteria when they assess students in the classroom. Evaluating learners’ results is important for their learning. However, what is needed to assess is not just their knowledge, but also how they apply what they know in context. For example, it is different to evaluate activities with one correct answer and assessing open-questions activities. According to Wiggins, “clear and appropriate criteria specify what we should look at to determine the degree of understanding and serve us in making a judgement-based process consistent and fair” (Wiggins, 172), what is to say that teachers must be aware of what are the most important points they need to consider in students’ assessment.

The most complex issue in assessing students is when teachers evaluate not just items of yes or not questions, like multiple choice, but assessing students performance that can be demostrated in quiestions that evaluates real comprehension, quality or proficiency in a certain topic. In order to organize what to assess, teachers need to follow a rubric. This is defined as a

“criterion based scoring guide consisting of a fixed measurement scale [...] and descriptions of the characteristics for each score point”

(Wiggins, 173), therefore this rubric will evaluate and determine which points are the student’s strenghts and weaknesses.

In this chapter it is also emphazised the concept of validity, now as a challenge within the classroom. As we know, the validity allows the teacher to determine how are students performing in the clase by basing in the scores. It also determine how effective the contents were for students understanding. However, teachers have to relate that evidence they get from the students with teachers’ criteria. Teachers need to interpretate how well students understood the lesson very carefully which makes validity a challenging issue. Besides, teachers need to be aware of how his lessons, activities or tests assessment will measure what is needed to evaluate in terms of students’ understanding.

Therefore we can conclude that developing an appropriate criteria is important for teachers to evaluate students performance by following the most important points which are organized in a evaluative rubric. Besides the concept of critaria can not be separated from the concept of validity, because in order to interpretate students understanding teachers must be aware of how effective the content was in comparison to what teachers expect from students.

Wiggins, Grant –McTighe, Jay. “Understanding by Design”. Chapter 8: Criteria and Validity. (2005)

Chapter 3“Gaining Clarity on our Goals”(Wiggins-McTighe)

In the chapter called “Gaining Clarity on our Goals”, Wiggins and McTighe focus on how to solve the mistake that teachers make when planning a lesson: "aimless coverage of content, and isolated activities that that are merely engaging (at best) while disconnected from intellectual goals in the learners’ minds"(Wiggins-McTighe,56). It means that teachers are constantly designing the lesson without having learning goals clear. In order to solve this problem teachers must be aware about the concept “Backward Design”, whose role is to help teachers to design the class content and the activity in a meaningful way, both aiming to the desired results. Taking a Cooking Class, the teacher must set the objective of the lesson, for example “in this lessons students will be able to bake a cake” which is what the teacher expect students to learn.

As soon as teachers understand the importance of backward design, they will start planning the lesson by identifying and setting the objectives of the lesson for the class. Teachers must know about content standards or learning outcomes in the class lesson. “[T]hese goals specify what students should know and able to do in various disciplines”(Wiggins-McTighe,60), therefore the objectives of the content or activity the students will learn or do respectively must be conected with what students will apply in a real context. For example, the teacher mentioned in the first paragraph teachs the learners about how to bake a cake. Apart from teaching the ingredients they need and the rules of baking correctly the teacher must be aware of how important is for students to learn how to do it if they want to work as bakers in the future.

One way to organize the content we will teach to our students is basing it on a prioritizing framework in order to compare the ideas that are wanted to teach and choose which are important for students to learn. Here the important issue is “to identify knowledge that students should be familiar with”(Wiggins-McTighe, 72). For example, in the lesson about baking a cake, students are not expected to know about the first person in baking a cake in the world, but they should know about how to bake it by themselves. In order words, teacher must prioritize the important information, abilities and concepts “that have connective and transfer power, within this unit and with other units of study on related topic” (Wiggins-McTighe, 72) that are important for students’ vocational training.

Wiggins, Grant –McTighe, Jay. “Understanding by Design”. Chapter 3: Gaining Clarity on our Goals. 2005

Understanding by Design (Wiggins-McTighe)

The text called “Understanding by Design” by Wiggins and McTighe tries to explain the importance of the concept “Understanding” in teaching-learning process. Apart from that concept, there is another one:

knowledge

, which can be also important for that process, provided that teachers do not confuse it with the previous one.

First of all, the authors starts to explain the concept of understanding by contrasting it with the word knowledge. Before explaining the difference by their own words, there is a quote at the very beginning of the chapter, which introduce the definition of both concepts: “The most characteristic thing about mental life, over and beyond the fact that one apprehends the events of the world around one, is that one constantly goes beyond the information given”. From this statement, the text defines understanding by the ability to analize and apply what we have learned.

Moreover, the text explained that acquiring knowledge is not enough if we can not understand the essential of what we learn and apply it in context. It is important for teachers to distinguish between understanding and knowledge when we are teaching a lesson in a class, because our main objective is to make students learn not only concepts by heart, but also learn how to apply them.

Finally, along with recognizing the difference between understanding and knowledge, teachers must know how to give lessons. Teachers must not make students learn by memory, they must adapt their knowledge and make it easier for learners to comprehend and apply. The text refers understanding as transferability: “Transferability is not mere plugging in of previously learned knowledge and skills”(Wiggins,40). This statement means that we (teachers/instructors) transfer all our knowledge not just by repeating what we have learned, but by transpass our knowledge in as creative and fluent as possible for a new task or new challenge. For example, teachers can transfer new skills by adding examples to a specific topic and give learners activities to perform, in order to assess their performance in class.