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.