fernandareports: a

fernandareports: Chapter 5: "The big idea - questions."

How can we engage our students to a deep understanding, inquiry and transfer of learning?
According to the UbD template, this can be accomplished through goals that are established in terms of Essential questions. Thinking about my teaching experience, this is absolutely true and meaningful if we want to develop our students'understanding and creative thinking.
Moreover, we as educators, must reflect on the routine teacher- talk that makes us sometimes feel so tired and our students so bored. On the contrary, the big-idea questions can stimulate our students'thought , and deepen their understanding of the concepts, topics, and other issues.
Another reflection is to take aside in some way the pat answers from our students and give relevance to think about important content ideas so that they can understand the key issues of the subject and foster the transfer of ides to other fields.
Nowadays, it is not easy to change our students'minds in response to reflection , curiosity and thought because students love the easy way out in their learning process, so it also requires great care to provoke discussion considering the sustaining of big ideas and the goals of the unit. In this way, questions can become essential due to the clarity of our intentions and expectations for learning activities and assessments.
Equally important is to make use of a mix of questions - topical and overarching - that deals with the deep use of big ideas and not the learned facts. These questions provide the units balance, variety and more effective work adding the students'role more intellectual and active.

fernandareports: a

fernandareports: a:

BIG IDEAS:" IMPORTANT ISSUE TO GET A BETTER UNDERSTANDING
OF OUR PLANS AND SYLLABI"

I feel highly convinced that it is relevant to establish a set of clear and appropriate ideas
when planning, teaching and assessing in order to make our students think deeply ,and as
teachers become more analytical about our learners' goals.

Moreover, if we focus our attention on learning priorities, our contents must contain not only big ideas
but also core tasks with the purpose of exploring and transferring ideas.

These tasks must also encourage our learners to discuss, reflect, research and debate instead of
memorizing concepts and passing tests to recall the information. Equally important is that our students
must be involved in the practice, coaching and feedback of these essential ideas to become more meaningful.

In this way, students can make sense of their learning and apply these ideas, topics, questions to real life
situations.
Apart from this, if our students interact with techniques for the sake of modeling, guided practice and feedback,
we will improve the productive skills. For example, when students have to do a power point presentation.

Therefore, we as educators, must foster these key elements such as "big ideas, core tasks, understandings. essential
ideas, knowledge and skills so that we can help our learners to get an effective learning.
Despite being a hard task, we are aware that clear, consistent and coherent educational goal are essentially meaningful.