Chapter five: Essential Questions: Doorways to understanding.

“The best questions push us to the heart of things-the essence” (Understanding by Design, p: 107).

As the author tries to tell us in this chapter, the challenge in designing is to start planning from an essential question, organize our programs, courses, unit of study, lessons and everything related to teaching around the essential questions, and make the content answer those questions. 

The aim of education is not just teaching and learning things for an evaluation (as most of our students do), our students need to realize how questioning everything around, could guide them to knowledge and understanding. Questions can be seen as doorways through which students can explore new concepts, theories, and unsolved problems and, through this process of questioning, is how students get involved in the process of learning and understanding. 

Good questions not only promote understanding but also allow students to make connections and promote new ideas to others.

Chapter Three: Gaining clarity o our goals

“The UbD Template is designed to help educators become more circumspect and analytic about the desired results” (Understanding by Design, p: 56).

In chapter three the authors make us realize that desire results are extremely necessary due to the big amount of aims that are simultaneously played in the classroom. Together with establishing the desired goals, we need to set up long-term priorities for the instruction and assessment within the classroom, that allows having clear objectives, and for that reason being able to take decisions and make choices.

Teachers tend to overload their lesson plan; there is too much content we think is important and necessary for students to learn, but there is not enough time. This is the reason we are forced to make choices and set explicit priorities; for instance we have to choose a few big ideas and design our classes around them and using them to frame teaching and assessment, resisting the temptation to teach everything.

The question is how can we choose our priorities in a unit or a course? According to the authors we can take into account three aspects to consider when establishing priorities: worth being familiar with, important to do and to know and big ideas and core tasks.

Once we reflect about that and concentrate on the important, we can have a real and teachable curriculum.