Chapter 5: Essential questions; Doorways to Understanding

           This chapter talks about the essential questions that help us to enhance the critical thinking of our students, but what is essential?...According to Wiggins and Mc Tighe in Understanding by design essential can be defined in four different ways when it is used to characterize questions. The first one has to do with important questions that recur throughout all our lives. The second one refers to core ideas and inquiries within a discipline, they are historically important.A third meaning for essential questions refers to what is needed for learning core content. If it helps students effectively inquire and make sense of important but complicated ideas and knowledge.And finally the last meaning refers to questions that will engage a specific and diverse set of learners. In other words, the same question is not necessarily important or essencial for and adult or another particular student.
            According to this chapter we as teachers have to know first our students, thus we can make and  prepare essential questions for them. We know that one of our duties is to help students think about their learning process and to raise their awareness of how they develop their own learning strategies  to become effective learners and independent thinkers.
            Hans George Gadamer said: " Only a person who has questions can have real understanding", but I ask myself, what about those students who never ask,not participate or simply are shy students. I have to think that he or she does not understand anything or he is not worried about his learning process...