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)