The most striking statement in the text says that making a question is not about what a question should look like, but about its power in context.
To narrow this down, I don’t think we are really aware, first of all, about the power of words, so let alone questions’. We might first analyse our own vocabulary, as we saw within the revision of our own educational laws, that concepts are not clearly stated. Most of the time, they’re too vast and vague allowing the reader to give them whatever interpretation you may think of. From this basis, we don’t even have clear our “master commandments”.
This is just an analogy to illustrate how difficult it is to settle our initial key concepts. Then, moving towards questions, as the text constantly reminds us, designing questions is a high order skill, an “art”. From this basic step concerning words, the series of suggestions and steps make the process even more complex.
It’s neither surprising then that we are not good at making proper overarching questions, nor do we wonder about being meagre critical thinkers. We must give students work that enables them to have an “aha!” Certainly we can do that, yet to give them a truly and genuine “aha!” it’s such a big task that not many teachers know how carry out.
At this point there’s another concept that I myself have not very clear, that of ‘context’. To achieve this question power, we are meant to control this context, whatever it means. Within the text, the idea of “context of use” appears in our EFL case as a fiction instance, totally opposed to the one an ESL subject may deal with.
As far as I understand, context comes into sight when developing skills, when you are meant to set into action your understanding. Nevertheless, is this a real context? I think it is not as the situations you could get being an ESL subject, and unfortunately, these cannot be reinforced outside the classroom (refering to language learning) So, are we really making good use of this “context” and all the powerful words that allow us to produce powerful questions with their consequent learning?
Mr. Wiggins spotted wisely the means by which we should guide successful, observable; hence, improvable learning, so as to develop effective understanding and not mere forgettable knowledge. Lately, I’ve been dealing with primary teachers who have told me about their experiences and ideas about teaching, and I could make out a few aspects that helped me to understand his ideas in a context. (Understanding?)
During my conversations with these teachers, I could single out some of the problems that in the long run will affect this chapter proposals: planning, assessment and I would add one more, commitment. I’ve noticed that lack of clarity in their knowledge/understanding of class stages, purposes and objectives which are unclear and aimless; in addition, the lack of context in their lessons is also a major flaw. One of these teachers I’m talking about told me about her problems teaching the prepositions to 6th graders. She claimed having explained thoroughly what part of speech prepositions belong to and so on and so forth (without realizing about the implications of this). The problem is not grammar but the contents, and possible values you may come up with while revising, say, prepositions (if there’s any related whatsoever).
Without lessons designed to bring ideas to life, concepts such as honour, manifest destiny, or the water cycle, remain empty phrases to be memorized, depriving learners of the realization that ideas have power (p. 43), which is a serious matter if we think about it carefully. Let alone assessment. If we want to educate our students on a critical thinking basis, crafting assessments to evoke transferability is one of the skills we need to develop by finding out if students can take their learning and use it wisely, flexibly creatively in unknown settings (p.48) in other words: autonomy. Last not least, commitment, which is one of the, or THE issue, which would help to solve some of the curriculum hampers we need to deal with. As mentioned above, ideas have power, and I’m afraid that some teachers virtually ignore the real impact of this idea.
