Comments on chapter 4: The Six Facets of Understanding

"Teach students that their job is not merely to learn facts and skills but also to question them for their meaning" (Wiggins, 2005, p.104) I think this quote summarizes the position of the author in front ofunderstanding and also our role as teachers to promote understading through the tasks, activities and assessments we prepare.

What I liked the most about the six facets is that they give us ideas about what types of things we can require our students to do. The definition of these six facets let us plan what we want our students to do and have clearer objectives when preparing a unit and an assessment.

I think it is important to train our students in doing all of these things because most of them are not easy to do. But I also think that these abilities are essential in order to become a critical thinker.

I would like to mention also that one of the most difficult ones for me at least is to help students acquire self-knowledge. I would like to hear some of your experiences regarding this area.

Comments on Chapter III: Gaining clarity on our goals

I would like to organize this text talking about the most important concepts that were discussed in this chapter:

1. Exit level objectives: Importance of long term priorities in planning. I truly believe that without these objectives clear in mind it is impossible to organize yourself and plan for the year. But I also think that you are able to identify or establish exit level objectives when you have been teaching in the same place for a few years, because you need to know the whole curriculum (not just the curriculum of the years you teach), you need to know the students and their reality, you need to be aware of the resources at hand, etc. It is also necessary to have a good coordination among teachers in order to define common goals and that is most of the times the biggest difficulty I would say.

2. Big ideas: These are closely connected to the previous concept because in order to establish level objectives, you need to define the big ideas that will lead your plan. Big ideas, as the author mentions, are necessary to connect the dots for the learner by establishing learning priorities. As the author mentions as well, the challenge is to identify a few big ideas and carefully design around them. Another difficulty that it is not mentioned there is that big ideas would not be the same regarding the context. That is why I believe it is difficult to follow the national standards without adapting them to your own reality. Moreover, I think it is a must that teachers defined their own priorities based on the ones proposed by the government.

3. Core task: The author defines them as the most important demands in any field. Authentic challenges involve realistic situations where the context of the task it is as faithful as possible to real-world opportunities and difficulties. I consider it is extremely relevant to define the types of tasks your students need to master when you plan evaluations and activities because you can organize your planning around them. Again, it is crucial to be constantly reflecting about them because there are certain needs that will appear regarding the generation or resources that will come at hand. For example, we cannot deny the need to provide our students with knowledge on technologies or incorporate technologies in the classroom that will make the tasks more meaningful to students. 

There are also other concepts that are important such as essential questions, understandings and knowledge that you need to think about when planning but you could not do without the first three I mentioned earlier.

Comments on chapter 2: Understanding understading

I really liked this chapter because it makes us reflect again upon our practice. What do we want from our students? What do we want them to be able to do? What type of evidence can we get of their actual understanding? The first challenge is to define what we want our students to understand, then the second challenge is to design an instrument or assessment that can be proof of that understanding. The third challenge is related to the correction of that assessment because we should also be able to use misunderstandings and promote learning from them.

As the author pointed out: "Evidence of misunderstanding is incredibly valuable to teachers, not to a mere mistake to be corrected. It signifies an attempted and plausible but unsuccessful transfer. The challenge is to reward the try without reinforcing the mistake or dampening future transfer attempts" 

There are also many dangers when teaching that are pointed out in this chapter. One of these dangers is to cover too many topics too quickly and that will go against learning. This is something that I have learned with practice, one of the levels I teach is 11th grade and I have to prepare them for the FCE. Grammar is very important in the FCE and there are many things to review but I have realized with time that it is impossible to review all the grammar contents that appear in textbooks, so I usually concentrate on a few, but I spend a lot of time going over different ways of approaching those contents and that has been more successful than trying to cover all of them.

The satisfaction is that the grammar contents we review are understood by students and that although we are not able to go over them all, the ones we managed to revise are grasped. In order to do that it is also important to take into account what Whitehead said: "Let the main ideas which are introduced to be few and important, and let them be thrown into every combination possible" (1929) I would say that this is one key to success.

Comments on Introduction and chapter 1 of Higgins book

There are many things that called my attention from these two chapters. The first thing was one of the quotes that expressed the feeling of a teacher remembering when he was a student: "I felt then that my brain was a way station for material going in one ear and (after the test) out the other. I could memorize very easily and so became valedictorian, but I was embarrassed even then that I understood much less than some other students who cared less about grades. This quote called my attention because I would never want my students to say this. Luckily I do not only use tests to evaluate my students performance and many of the things we do have a greater impact on them. But whenever I have to work with grammar contents the impression is that you cover the same things year after year and students never seem to get it.

Something else that I found revealing from the Introduction is that the autor talked about the need to focus and work on students' misconceptions. He says: "We need to design lessons and assessments that anticípate, evoke, and overcome the most likely students' misconceptions" What I usually do is that after an evaluation or exercise done in class I collect students' common mistakes and create activities so that students recognize and correct their own mistakes or I do a dictation with commonly mispelled words. But that is not enough according to what Higgins proposes. He talks about the need to forsee students difficulties and that implies a lot of reflection and analysis before planning the units and creating evaluations.

I also liked the idea of teachers as designers, I had never thought of that before, although one of my favorite tasks as a teacher is to create material and rethink units. But Higgins again challenges us because he highlights the need to think on the desired outcome before planning activities and that again means reflection and time to plan everything which can be really difficult throughout the year. Some advantages that I have in the school where I work is that one of our goals is the FCE exam students take at the end of 11th grade because that is a guidance of what we want our students to achieve and it is very precise in terms of the abilities and skills students need to develop. Another advantage is that although we don't follow the national curriculum we have a "marco de evaluación" that sets the goals for every level per semester and that is another guidance we have when planning. Besides, the school gives us the time every year during December to plan for the following year, so I have the time to reflect on what was done and plan for the next year. Then during the year I also have time to make adjustments to the planning. Finally, I work with three other teachers and that lets us collaborate and reflect in a better way than when working on your own.