Questions....

“…good questions are not answered with finality in a brief sentence, and that’s the point. Their aim is to stimulate thought, to provoke inquiry and to spark more questions, not just pat answers. They are broad; full of transfer possibilities…they enable us to uncover the real riches of a topic obscured by glib pronouncements in texts or routine teacher-talk…”

As I read Chapter 5 and the importance about essential questioning within the classroom, I started to think about the kind of questions my students are used to responding in a very brief and poor way. After doing not quite a lot of thinking I realized that the questions asked were literal topic-focused text questions that admit one answer only. And even that type of questions students are not able to answer.

First I thought it was a matter of English language handling; that –of course- students would never answer in the right way because they can barely verbalize in English. So it is not about the question, it is about the students’ lack of English Language knowledge. But then I had second thoughts. It is not about a language barrier thing. It is only about us and our role as mentors and creative-thinking enhancers. It seems to me that we as teachers sometimes are so under-prepared in fostering critical thinking skills in our students since our programs and their specifications revolve around matters that do not any enquiring further than locating a good answer in one of the paragraphs the questions is based on and teachers have lost the power they had over the curriculum for reasons such as school constrains.  The curriculum must tell teachers exactly what to do, when to do it, and in what order.

Fostering essential questioning and answering in our students is part as our role as educators since we are not here to transfer raw knowledge, facts, dates or pronunciation. A big part of being a teacher involves shaping free-thinking and creative individual who are able to see things beyond definition and tradition. Individuals that are able to make themselves as well as other see the world with new eyes.

Trying to understando how to....understand?

As I read Chapter II and analyzed the subtle differences among the concepts discussed, I started to think that the problem of us teachers when developing and applying curriculum, programs and syllabus is that we are lacking clarification on those key concepts that need to be handle so as both students and teachers are able to pursue same goals in similar ways.

The concepts I’m talking about are of course knowledge, understanding and transfer. I got so used to repeat those two first words on my programs, to my students in the classroom and to myself whenever I planned a lesson for them that somehow I never considered all of the important perspectives and meanings they have regarding education. And I never took into account the idea of transference as a vital part of a meaningful learning process! As I was writing this, I came across with the concept of intelligence on the internet, which is defined as the ability to adapt one’s knowledge to different situations and contexts. Part of our responsibility as teachers is to develop and increase intelligence in our students but to do so without having the slightest comprehension about the cycle that transfer, understanding and knowledge form.

There cannot be transference of the skills that need to be learned without having a proper handling of the facts and then grasping the essence and meaning of those facts, allowing the student to discern which knowledge should fit best when facing new situations and contexts. That’s the aim of teaching! Helping our students to internalize that cognitive cycle will provide opportunities for teachers to develop goal-oriented design that mean more to students that just developing one activity after another without any apparent purpose; to really take in the importance of this cognitive cycle will provide both students and teachers real opportunities to transfer knowledge. The students will be able to put their skills to effective use and the teachers will be able to transfer what they have learned from goal-oriented design to different teaching contexts and make them work.