Chapter V: Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding

Teachers are always struggling when making questions because these imply more than just questioning something; we are dealing with knowledge and understanding. Students fear of answering because they can be ridiculed for the type of answer they can give. Moreover, students not just fear of answering, but also about making questions because of the same reason. The author makes a distintion between overarching and topical questions. The firstone is more general and gives more space for interpretations and different points of view. The second focusses mainly in a "right answer" that we want our studentes to notice. Here the author says that both are equally important because they measure different things that, depending on the lesson, can be important. From my point of view one type of question is not taken into account in many schools nowadays, whcih is overarching questions, because, as we have 45 or more students in a classroom, it is difficult to listen to the variety of answers they have for just one question, but also, because as ourschool system does not put much effort on developing respect among people, students fear of others' rections to their answers. This is why I would like to remark what the author mentions in the text: The way in which oour students are going to react and develop depends not just in our questions, but in the way we develop the lesson. A question can make a difference, but it is not enough!

Chapter IV: The Six Facets of Understanding

In this chapter the author states 6 indicators of understanding which are, - Explanation: Here the student need to create links between ideas in order to be able to state a point of view giving reasons and argumments. - Interpretation: Students get involved in the task linking it with their previous knowledge and their feelings about it. - Application: there is an emphasis on performing what was learned putting it into practice. - Perspective: To make assumptions of what is learned and to be able to see the implications this carries. - Empathy: The capacity to conect ourselves (in terms of feelings) with others feel or think. - Self-Knowledge: References to how well we know ourselves. Here people can identify what they know and what they do not know. Appart from this facets, the author mentions that teachers cannot teach meaning because it is an internal process, but they can guide students to reach meaning by asking them for the meaning they have created. Here we help students to connect what they already know with what we expect them to learn guiding them to use it, makin this new knowledge meaningful for them. From my point of view, teachers forget that students bring experiences and feelings with them, so letting them explain what they know, and then letting them explain what they understood makes them be aware of what they really know. This helps them to reach metacognition, what makes students, and people in general, to understand their own ways of learning; an important tool for understanding that is not explicitly mentioned in the text.

Chapter III: Gaining Clarity on Our Goals

When teachers plan their lessons, it is normal to start pointing out some activities that can be interesting for the students. Here we are not forgeting our students, on the contrary; we are thinking about them in order to create a lesson that can be mottivating for them. Undeniably, the previous is an important point when planning a lesson, but before thinking about that we need to think about the goals of it. When planning, we think, mainly, in one main thing: Skills to develop. In the text the author mentions two different goals: Skill-related aims and Performance goals. The author describes as skill-related aims the "techniquesband approaches [...] and processes [...]". On the contrary, the author refers to Performance goals as complex and long-term outcomes [...]". In the text, it is stated that "content mastery is not the aim of instruction, but a means." From my point of view, teachers need to reflect upon the students' needs. With this I mean that teachers have to look for the process that was damaged in students that affect their learning of the content or that influences/affect a specific behaviour. After that, teachers should think about the goals they have with the class and prepare some processes or techniques to use in order to get to the aim. After doing so, it is natural that the learning of content will appear, but we cannot forget about the different intelligences students have and the different levels in which they are, because the techniques we use can affect our stuents' comprehension of the content. Doing this, teachers will be able to demonstrate that being a teacher is more than just content; what will also empower them with the responsibility they carry for life.

Chapter II: Understanding Understanding

Every teacher has asked him/herself, at least once in their lives, How do I know my students undestood the content? We know that it is a hard task because understanding is a mental process, so we cannot see it from outside. In this chapter, the author describes undestanding in two ways: "mental construct, an abstraction made by the human mind to make sense of the many distinct pieces of knowledge.", "To understand is to have done it in the right way, often reflected in being able to explain why a particular skill, approach, or body of knowledge is or is not appropriate in a paticular situation.", and "To understand a topic or subject is to be able to use [...] knowledge and skill wisely and effectively." Knowing this, we can say that understanding requires using mental processes, explanations, knowledges, and usage of them. Acoording to the author, it "requires ability to self-assess, justify, and critique doings." An important charactteristic mentioned in the book is that understanding let people use knowledge flexibly transfering it to different situations, being able to adapt knowledge to them. From my point of view, we, teachers, do not need to ask students to define a concept to make sure they understood the topic. On the contrary, I strongly believe that their production and adaptation of the knowledge they have can be expressed in different ways, keeping in mind that it will depend on their learning styles and types of intelligences.