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!