“Which way I ought to go from here?
That depends where you want to get to.
I don’t much care where, so long as I get somewhere”
Lewis Caroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Which way shall we take to finally develop valuable, useful and usable skills in our students?
It depends where we want to lead them, and different from careless Alice’s response, we ought to know WHERE we go.
To know where we are going we have to establish clear goals.
Goals must be long-term because in that way we can clarify what to teach and what to leave aside.
Otherwise, as the author states, “Deep understandings of transferable big ideas fall through the cracks of lessons devoted to developing unconnected and unprioritized content”.
The perfect complement for well established goals are Essential Questions, which apart from eliciting true understanding and promoting transferability, have the power of highlighting the big ideas that form the very core of any design.
Clear goals will lead us to set an also clear range of skills to be developed.
Inside this broad concept of skills I found very interesting the analysis of enabling skills. We sometimes take for granted that our students are able to perform tasks that usually go beyond their control or nobody has ever taught them before, like talking in front of an audience, developing computer based tasks, etc. If we want them, let’s say to perform a nice and smooth presentation, we must develop additional skills, not just the content based ones.
In crystallizing our goals inside the classroom, we may encounter different problems, also described in this chapter, where established goals are too big, too small, too vague or too many. As a solution for this, the chapter suggests “unpacking” standards, which means to identify the big ideas and core tasks inside them and combine that with essential questions, giving birth to the precious transfer.
We already know what Essential Questions are; big ideas are the ones in charge of establishing priorities inside our students’ minds, through them they will know what is or is not worth paying attention to making learning effective and efficient.
How can we identify big ideas then? The author proposes tips to do so; I found number four very interesting. If the unit on…is a story, what’s the moral of the story?
The answer to that question necessarily needs from the students to mix his inner world with the topic to be developed, it requires transfer. Straight to the point, efficient, but at the same time elegant and human. Perfect.
Coming back to Wonderland…..I do not want to get somewhere, my goals are clearer and I do care.
That depends where you want to get to.
I don’t much care where, so long as I get somewhere”
Lewis Caroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Which way shall we take to finally develop valuable, useful and usable skills in our students?
It depends where we want to lead them, and different from careless Alice’s response, we ought to know WHERE we go.
To know where we are going we have to establish clear goals.
Goals must be long-term because in that way we can clarify what to teach and what to leave aside.
Otherwise, as the author states, “Deep understandings of transferable big ideas fall through the cracks of lessons devoted to developing unconnected and unprioritized content”.
The perfect complement for well established goals are Essential Questions, which apart from eliciting true understanding and promoting transferability, have the power of highlighting the big ideas that form the very core of any design.
Clear goals will lead us to set an also clear range of skills to be developed.
Inside this broad concept of skills I found very interesting the analysis of enabling skills. We sometimes take for granted that our students are able to perform tasks that usually go beyond their control or nobody has ever taught them before, like talking in front of an audience, developing computer based tasks, etc. If we want them, let’s say to perform a nice and smooth presentation, we must develop additional skills, not just the content based ones.
In crystallizing our goals inside the classroom, we may encounter different problems, also described in this chapter, where established goals are too big, too small, too vague or too many. As a solution for this, the chapter suggests “unpacking” standards, which means to identify the big ideas and core tasks inside them and combine that with essential questions, giving birth to the precious transfer.
We already know what Essential Questions are; big ideas are the ones in charge of establishing priorities inside our students’ minds, through them they will know what is or is not worth paying attention to making learning effective and efficient.
How can we identify big ideas then? The author proposes tips to do so; I found number four very interesting. If the unit on…is a story, what’s the moral of the story?
The answer to that question necessarily needs from the students to mix his inner world with the topic to be developed, it requires transfer. Straight to the point, efficient, but at the same time elegant and human. Perfect.
Coming back to Wonderland…..I do not want to get somewhere, my goals are clearer and I do care.
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ReplyDeleteSince we usually feel adrift castaways in this huge ocean of teaching, we do not even now where to go and which path to take.
ReplyDeleteEvidently the idea of ‘taking things for granted’ is one of the many sins we commit in our teaching. Yet we are still on time to start modifying our praxis not only at classroom but at planning level.
I agree on the idea that we must be clear about caring and knowing which way to go, so as to lead our students towards the safest path to reach goals.
However, instead of thinking of reaching the so - called "perfection", which gives room for a huge metaphysical debate, it may more benefitial to start thinking about efficiency in teaching.
Hi Vicky
ReplyDeleteAs you said, it is clear enough that goals are one of the most important aspects when teaching a lesson. It’s clear evidence of the planning process in which we have considered most of the variables in a specific course. Therefore, this it is incredibly useful to have the goal(s) we want to achieve completely clear in our minds. In addition, through these goals we will be able to answer relevant questions regarding the purpose of the lesson, the reason we want to aim a specific goal, etc.
Dear Vicky,
ReplyDeleteI think one of our main mistakes is that we rely on the text book without paying too much attention on where we go. Furthermore, why we are going that way. This is our everyday reality.By no establishing clear goals we (teacher and students) are working without any fundation. The learning process becomes a non sense when there's no refernt to go back.
Hi Vicky,
ReplyDeleteOur lessons can't be built only on nice intentions, but on strong objectives.
I agree with you in terms of developing them but short and effective questions which enable the expected transfer.
When having that clear, things go smoothly. What we teachers have to look for is the quality of education we are offering our students, and that also relies on how clear we are about the lessons and courses' aims at the end of the process.
It doesn't make any sense to regret about what we might have done in the past, but we do need to consider this in the lessons which we are teaching and will teach, taking advantage of every precious second of teaching and learning.
Hi Vicky
ReplyDelete“We ought to know WHERE we go”. A difficult but necessary task to accomplish; otherwise, how do we pretend to lead our students? To do so, reflecting on our goals and then planning seem to be the key in this process. Time consuming, don’t you think? But the author, as you said, gives us some interesting clues to face this task as it is to identify Big Ideas in order to prioritize teaching issues. It could be a very useful tool to clearly set our goals and therefore to choose the correct tasks to be developed by our students in order to aim an effective learning.
“Which way I ought to go from here?
That depends where you want to get to.
I don’t much care where, so long as I get somewhere” excellent words to summarize your post.
the most important question here is not why or how, it is where, our goals, we have to be aware of our goals in order to know how to get there, we can have hundreds of ways but we need to know where we are going to look for the right way to get there. it is not our future which is at the endo or the road, it is our students`, we can not just flip a coin and make a decission, we must be conscious
ReplyDeleteI think once we have a clear picture of the main objectives of the school curriculum we can start to develop a kind of map of the resources we need to carry out the task regarding practices, materials, content and assessment which will be useful to get at part of our desired objectives successfully.
ReplyDelete