“…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.
So, in a way to overcome that problem a good solution would be to ask yourself some sort of "intrinsican and personal" types of essential questions...like "What methodology will most engage my students?" etc. Sometimes we don't really know what we want.
ResponderEliminarWhat can we do to change teachers'minds? Despite all the constraints we face in our working experience, we must speak louder and feel sure that this change is necessary to achieve a meaningful learning . Be up and doing!!!!
ResponderEliminarDefinetely, we need a change, otherwise we will spend more and more years complaining and we won't get anything. It requires a lot of effort and people willing to make things in a different way
ResponderEliminarIn my opinion we need more than just the idea of change but also more hours in classes and a better instruction to use hours in the best way. Maybe, we could just do some extra activities such as watching films or cartoons in English with English caption, but I am sure that if we did it, others would think that we are just wasting time, because it looks too much fun for education.
ResponderEliminar