We know that questions are the most often used strategy applied by teachers after lecturing and since we have clear that standing in front of a class and do all the talking is the deadliest sin a teacher can commit, let’s eliminate that item from the list.
Now, after lecturing is gone, the first place is for questions. But….any kind of questions? The ones in the textbook? The ones that I am going to include in the next test? No….Essential questions.
What are “essential” questions?
This chapter tells us about this kind of questions and how they can make a difference when teaching. We can transform our class from a dull, non-sense asking and answering machine into an instance of thinking, analyzing , transferring information from previous experiences into the class, so as to make it as close as possible to the “real context” we are always looking for so badly.
Essential questions are the ones that make the minds of our students work, the ones that trigger all the potential inside their brains.
When I read a text like this , my deepest concern is to relate what I am reading with theories I know or have heard about ( I am transferring…GOOD!), and in this opportunity Bloom’s taxonomy and Krashen’s i+1 hypotheses came to my mind.
“Essential questions do not refer to the topic content but to the big ideas that cut across units and courses.”
It is not the same to ask our students what colors are there in the picture? than what do you think colors in the picture mean?. The first one can be answered mechanically, whereas the second requires deep, critical thought, the student is invoking all the ideas in his mind, to give an answer. What a difference right? BUT:
What happens if my student is engaged, he is transferring information from that day when he went to a place with his mother to see what color her soul was and the woman said purple and purple meant sadness and so on and so forth…BUT he can hardly manage basic vocabulary, he will not be able to answer my question in spite of having the answer. I have faced this situation and I can see frustration in that student’s face.
Was it my fault to ask a question unanswerable with the tools that students have?
I know I have to provide my students with input that goes just one step beyond their level of command of the language. (Here is the part where Krashen was haunting me)
My question is…how can I harmonize the level of my students with deep, thought provoking questions?
Regarding Bloom’s taxonomy:
Essential questions require students to evaluate, synthesize and analyze therefore, essential questions can be found at the top of Bloom’s taxonomy.
That made me think about the teachers that came before me in my student’s lives.
If they were never taught to go beyond the simplest level of mind work which is knowledge, they will not be able to answer the essential questions.
Our Chilean culture is shy, always afraid of giving opinions; therefore the challenge is not only to elicit language from my students but also to leave aside that shy side of them.
All I can say is that the text states it very wisely: Asking essential questions is an art and it is a must when developing critical thinking in our students, overcoming language levels and cultural features. How? That is our challenge.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Saturday, September 5, 2009
“Understanding is the result of facts acquiring meaning for the learner:
To grasp the meaning of a thing is to see it in its relations to other things: to see how it operates or functions, what uses it can be put to. The relation of means consequence is the center and heart of all understanding.”
When I read this, I immediately thought about the idea of Teaching in context. Again we can see the importance of teaching a language as a whole and by no means as isolated items or grammar formulas as it was thought in the past.
Reasons? Very simple, if we teach pieces of language for our students to memorize, we are developing empty knowledge and not meaningful understanding.
“Doing something correctly, therefore, is not by itself, evidence of understanding: It might have been an accident . TO UNDERSTAND IS TO HAVE DONE IT IN THE RIGHT WAY,OFTEN REFLECTED IN BEING ABLE TO EXPLAIN WHY A PARTICULAR SKILL, APPROACH,OR BODY OF KNOWLEDGE IS OR IS NOT APPROPRIATE IN A PARTICULAR SITUATION.
Of course, a student can memorize thousand of words, formulas or whatever you ask him to, and if you do that, you will possibly also test all those items and mark them.
But what for? That student can easily get a 7, since he memorized everything just as you taught him, but is he going to be able to use those items in situations different from the ones that appeared in his text book? (If any), I don’t think so.
Understanding is about TRANSFER, to be truly able requires the ability to transfer our knowledge effectively involves the capacity to take what we know and use it creatively ,fluently ,in different settings, ON OUR OWN.
That requires an education in how to plug in specific facts or formulas.
On our own, those are the key words. If we want autonomous individuals, with ideas and opinions, critical thinkers able to agree or disagree and willing to express intelligent and coherent ideas then we have to train them on how to use the abilities learned in previous experiences when facing new challenges, in other words, how to TRANSFER.
This concept also reminded me of my neurolinguistic classes in pregrado and the empty slots to be filled with new info. transferred from our mother tongue. That was always an interesting topic for me and now that I find it again here, I am more convinced that teaching English is far beyond teaching about English.
Evidence of misunderstanding is incredibly valuable to teachers, not a mere mistake to be corrected. It signifies an attempted and plausible but unsuccessful transfer. The challenge is to reward the try without reinforcing the mistake or dampening future transfer attempts
Error analysis is a very interesting field that is not very often approached by teachers.
Our student’s errors are a precious source of information for us, again, remembering linguistics in pregrado I was thinking about this concept of “overgeneralization” that I found pretty fascinating. For example, a student thinking that “fishes” is the plural for “ fish” is over generalizing the rule for plurals, that can be considered an error, but if you think about it, the student IS transferring previous knowledge, so the mechanism in his brain is in fact working, so we have to feel satisfied with it and help him internalize the concept of exceptions then.
Pretty interesting……
To grasp the meaning of a thing is to see it in its relations to other things: to see how it operates or functions, what uses it can be put to. The relation of means consequence is the center and heart of all understanding.”
When I read this, I immediately thought about the idea of Teaching in context. Again we can see the importance of teaching a language as a whole and by no means as isolated items or grammar formulas as it was thought in the past.
Reasons? Very simple, if we teach pieces of language for our students to memorize, we are developing empty knowledge and not meaningful understanding.
“Doing something correctly, therefore, is not by itself, evidence of understanding: It might have been an accident . TO UNDERSTAND IS TO HAVE DONE IT IN THE RIGHT WAY,OFTEN REFLECTED IN BEING ABLE TO EXPLAIN WHY A PARTICULAR SKILL, APPROACH,OR BODY OF KNOWLEDGE IS OR IS NOT APPROPRIATE IN A PARTICULAR SITUATION.
Of course, a student can memorize thousand of words, formulas or whatever you ask him to, and if you do that, you will possibly also test all those items and mark them.
But what for? That student can easily get a 7, since he memorized everything just as you taught him, but is he going to be able to use those items in situations different from the ones that appeared in his text book? (If any), I don’t think so.
Understanding is about TRANSFER, to be truly able requires the ability to transfer our knowledge effectively involves the capacity to take what we know and use it creatively ,fluently ,in different settings, ON OUR OWN.
That requires an education in how to plug in specific facts or formulas.
On our own, those are the key words. If we want autonomous individuals, with ideas and opinions, critical thinkers able to agree or disagree and willing to express intelligent and coherent ideas then we have to train them on how to use the abilities learned in previous experiences when facing new challenges, in other words, how to TRANSFER.
This concept also reminded me of my neurolinguistic classes in pregrado and the empty slots to be filled with new info. transferred from our mother tongue. That was always an interesting topic for me and now that I find it again here, I am more convinced that teaching English is far beyond teaching about English.
Evidence of misunderstanding is incredibly valuable to teachers, not a mere mistake to be corrected. It signifies an attempted and plausible but unsuccessful transfer. The challenge is to reward the try without reinforcing the mistake or dampening future transfer attempts
Error analysis is a very interesting field that is not very often approached by teachers.
Our student’s errors are a precious source of information for us, again, remembering linguistics in pregrado I was thinking about this concept of “overgeneralization” that I found pretty fascinating. For example, a student thinking that “fishes” is the plural for “ fish” is over generalizing the rule for plurals, that can be considered an error, but if you think about it, the student IS transferring previous knowledge, so the mechanism in his brain is in fact working, so we have to feel satisfied with it and help him internalize the concept of exceptions then.
Pretty interesting……
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