Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding.

When we talk about understanding it means that everything has to be covered. In other words, to achieve understanding it is necessary to cover different aspects during the whole process of assessment. For that reason, educators have to manage more than knowledge, they need to make connections to stimulate students' minds. As facilitators teachers have to control those big ideas which are promoting new aspects in the learning.

Teaching is an action that compels teachers to ask constantly, however questioning is not a simple exercise within the class. Questions are the main point when students have to be encouraged by educators. Using questions that "effectively frame our work" the possibilities of achieve a good result in terms of effective learning are bigger. When teachers make questions these questions have to be focused on creating meaningful connections in order to stimulate and motivate students in that area. As tools of teaching, questions have to be well guided because if they are not well focused on the specific topic or point they would be a wall for students to get in the main idea. Good questions are always pointing to the center of the problem.

As fundamental tools, essential questions are not essential for themselves. This means that they depend on more factors that help them to be really effective. Purpose, audience and the impact that they provoque are components that are connected with the intent or purpose that teachers are trying to find on students. However, the way educators manage those elements is a challenge during the whole learning process they have to deal with. In he design, questions have to be formulated from an integrative perspective that stimulate inquire on students' minds as a dual process.

Finally, in the discussion if essential questions are focused on certainn subjects like English and not in others, it is necessary to say that essential questions are trying to develop more than skills or content, their intent is to establish those big ideas into consideration on students's minds. The purpose of asking questions compel both teachers and students to connect big ideas, essential questions and skills to cover every aspect of learning, where the scope of their effectiveness is linked to the reflection and design of them.

Backward Design. Chapter 1.

As teachers we have to think and prepare our classes to facilitate students’ performances and understandings. Design is a complex task in the educational process which means a big challenge when teachers have to analyze and apply concepts in the classroom. For that reason, designers have to manage techniques to create better procedures in the process.

Design means to understand students’ needs to face those opportunities. At the beginning of the process designers have to determine goals to achieve as clear purposes in the learning, “in other words, all the methods and materials we use are shaped by a clear conception of the vision of desired results” (Wiggins & Mc Tighe) Expected outcomes are the objectives that help us to clarify and determine what contents and how those contents should be learnt effectively by students.

Three points are necessary to carry out backward design. First; identify desired problems, which is the step to develop clarity in the design. Determine acceptable evidence means that we need to know if students have achieved the objectives that we proposed to achieve using evidence to analyze them. Finally, with plan learning experiences and instruction, designers have to think in the best instructional activities to connect their objectives with students’ needs according to the results and the evidence that has been observed.

Before planning a course we have to make our thoughts, ideas and goals as clear as possible to design units connected to real understanding for students. Moreover, designers have to manage these tools to develop better plans and classes in the classroom to reduce mistakes, in order to improve the educational process.