Crafting Understandings
This chapter takes an in-depth look at ¨understandings¨- such as what they are, how they are acquired and their common misconceptions. Five distinct features of understandings are given, and what seems to be emphasized is that ¨an understanding refers to transferable, big ideas,¨ like the big ideas we learned about in previous chapters. This means that an understanding is not just a simply-stated fact or truism. To acheive understanding, one must ask questions about the facts or information already known and collected and connect and apply them to other situations. There is a clear distinction between getting a fact and getting an understanding, and the authors assert, ¨An understanding makes a claim using facts¨ (132).
I find that this chapter relates to the previous chapter in many ways. In Chapter Five, we learned how questions that only ask for recall of material are almost never essential questions. In Chapter Six, we notice that through those non-essential questions, our students will not gain understanding, even if their answers are correct. A good, essential question will require the student to uncover the answer. It should take time and thought if understanding is truly the goal.
yes! we should be asking questions to our students that make them think, to discover by themselves, but again when you have 45 student it is a bit difficult.
ReplyDeleteI think the key concepts in this chapeter are "understanding" and "facts". We should, therefore, have the difference between these concepts very clear so we plan based upon the former.
ReplyDeleteI agree, this chapter is closely connected to the chapter we read before.I can say that in many cases we don't give enough time to develop this understanding, we tend to focus more on concrete questions expecting at the same time concrete answers. It is true that we don't have enough time during every single lesson, but at least it's good to try new ways of developing this understading and the use of essential questions seems to be very useful.
ReplyDeleteI think that before thinking so ambitiously, we have to learn how to create questions....
ReplyDeleteAnd that's the point. Teachers need to have a real change... Otherwise those ideas will remain in just ideas and no actions...