Chapter 5: Essential questions: doorways to understanding

Essential questions help teachers stay focus on big ideas. These questions need to transfer deep understanding to the students and must be answerable as well as to be a sort of "doorway" that leads students to the exploration of core concepts of a certain content.

I understand by this, that in some way students are encouraged to debate, analyze and criticize their understanding of an issue in order to stimulate their deep thinking and relate content, thus, improve  their high-cognitive skills. Of course, questions should be shaped around the objective(s) of the unit or they wouldn’t be focused.

I think that these type of inquiries and discussions should be made also by the part of the students, especially teenagers. Why not give them the tools to make "essential questions" on a certain topic by themselves? It's important that students be autonomous critical thinkers because it is something that they will need throughout their lives, not only at school, but also outside of it. 

Students need to have the tools to deal with problematic daily issues e.g. drugs, alcohol, morality, etc. only if they have been given appropriate ground and guidance and make them feel their questions are always acceptable.

Chapter 3- Gaining Clarity on our Goals

    To begin with, it is always important to consider (as it was mentioned in this chapter) not only the teachers' requirements when creating and teaching a course, but also the students' needs to understand" how to learn" and "how to perform" besides other issues. It's on the teachers' role to help students improve their abilities to accomplish their understandings about the goals of their learning.
    Worth mentioning are the content standards or learning outcomes we find in educational planning. The overload content becomes a problem, because most of the time teachers are asked to teach too much content, e.g. all the units of a book, not having enough time to focus adequately on their students' needs and interests. In the long run, they are obliged to limit their work beyong their wills.
    Probably, the idea to focus on Big ideas and design around them could help much better frame teaching and assessment as well as help students encourage reflective work.