Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding

Hi fellow seekers of insight,I think those amongst "us" who used to wonder:Why must we learn in the classroom style chosen by our teacher?....may benefit the most from checking out Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding [Kindle Edition]Jay McTighe (Author), Grant Wiggins (Author)You don't have to be a teacher to gain from reading it.It is a short 119 pages, but uses most of them to explain how you can empower your own learning process.Yes, there are also suggestions of why the fact recall method of training doesn't promote transferable understanding, but that's not where the real value of the book lies.You will probably revisit it several times, and may find its suggestions useful for re-framing ideas.After accepting the premise, you may with time also unconsciously find yourself trying to identify provocative verbs that signal that you can re-frame the facts being viewed by you.That's been my experience.My attraction to the content in the book is that it gave me a road-map describing ..(albeit a little roughly).., how I could use language in the form of questions to encourage & discover new, bigger ideas ON MY OWN.Being able to do so is very helpful to CONFIDENCE building if you are taking courses where the pass mark is 75%. (e.g. Customs Broker type Exams)I like this quote " It is rarely the case that we come to understand a new and complex teaching or experience on first blush. That's why it is proper to say that meaning is made and understanding is earned over time."NOTE:I have recently purchased & have been reading this book, finding that it compliments Mr. Puryear's contribution to the ADD community. (i.e. Your Life Can Be Better: using strategies for Adult ADD/ADHD... Douglas A. Puryear MD (Author)Cheers,Simple Guy.

This text continues the necessary discussion of designing curriculum for higher-order thinking by placing essential questions at the center of UbD. The benefit of this book is that while in their first work Understanding by Design they cover the issue of Essential Questions in one chapter, this time around the authors flesh out issues around using EQs in the classroom. Although some of the material in the first three chapters was already covered in the first book, additional charts, and a greater explanation on how teachers can make essential questions based on skills is much more useful. As a language teacher I definitely find these sections very useful.The book is also an answer to schools already applying UbD, and thus, it focuses a lot more on classroom processes than on theoretical foundations. As a result, it gives in-depth discussion as to how to keep alive the EQs throughout the school year, covers how many EQs per lesson are possible, and reinforces the idea that EQs should be at the center of the classroom. In addition to this, W&M make connections between EQs with older ideas, such as Socratic Questioning and The Paideia Proposal. The authors also make sure that this text is teacher-friendly, allowing for reasonable time to adapt new ways of thinking classroom planning as well as discussing potential problems that may arise in the classroom.A caveat is that this book is not about specific strategies or methodologies, or about curriculum philosophies albeit Socrates and Plato are briefly discussed with respect to questioning methods in the classroom. This is a text that is specifically designed as a follow up on how to design and use EQs within the Understanding by Design planning templates, and thus can be helpful for the curriculum maps.

A very good book. This one ties into their previous book Understanding by Design. If you have not read it, this should still be incredibly accessible. This book is designed to help you focus on the overarching ideas for each class. In literature, what is the 1-2 topics that all the books have in common? What is the meaning of life? Are we ruled by fate or free will? The types of questions that cannot be answered with a yes/no response and require thought. The difficulty of this book is that while they give an abundance of examples, the onus to create essential questions for the classroom is up to you. This is rightfully so as each classroom is different in scope than all others, but it does require quite a bit of work outside of the time put into reading. They give you "homework" of sorts that is very rewarding, but you should not expect to be given the answers. I learned more from this one than any of the education books I read this summer.

This is a good book which makes a serious contribution to the development of teachers’ skills in questioning. But, the book does not give any background on how questions are currently used (or not used). It does make a comment about the difficulty teachers face, too much content to cover and not enough time to cover it thoroughly. That is an important problem but the authors say little about how to help teachers solve it. Chapter Six, which covers implementation, makes many good suggestions but does not truly show the teacher how to solve the content pressure. In some ways the essential questions are basically those that fall into the top three levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (particularly the new Anderson, et.al. version) but McTighe and Wiggins never mention that. The types of questions considered essential do represent the higher levels of learning and thinking, as I explained in my book on teaching critical thinking (available from Amazon).

Dare I say an essential resource for learning how to work with essential questions. Great descriptions, explanations, and lots of examples.

Bought this as a new teacher looking for ways to improve my teaching. Book arrived faster than I thought it would. Nice! It was also in great condition. Very happy with this purchase

“Paradigm Shifter” - to use a trite cliché. Do you want to better engage your students? Do you want to add depth to your lessons? Are you more merely curious about what a question is and how they work?This book is FANTASTIC.

Great resource for all teachers - worth the time to sit and read.

Excellent resource for teachers. Just wish there was a smaller, more compact version. This is big and floppy.

These questions help students critically think which leads to better understanding and more enriched learning.

useful

Awesome book