"Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding"

Chapter 5, form the book called Understanding by design, is focused on the importance of essential questions in a classroom. The chapter mainly talks about Essential Questions that are fundamental in any class when we are teaching a lesson
basically because they help us to warm up the new lesson and also they can let us have open discussions where we can bring up many important ideas. As we have seen in other chapters, teachers must estimulate their students to reach understanding and not only aquiring knowledge that is why the questions that we use in a class must be the adequate ones and not choosing any question.
The chapter describe many different concepts about the importance of questions in a class, in the next paragraphs we are going to explain the three main ideas of the chapter.

Firstly, the text describes why questions are important and it is mainly because they stimulate our students´mind and provoke curiosity among students. When we formulate a good question we can make our students´go beyond the main concept and make them think abour more questions meanwhile they are finding the most suitable answer. For example, if we are asking our students about the origin of the earth, there are many questions that can bring up related with the topic and also many topics can be mentioned depending in their own believes and way of thinking.

Secondly, the text gives a completely description of why do we call those questions "Essential questions". It gives four different meanings.
-"they are important questions that recur throughout all our lives", and this means that the answer of those questions can be related with what we have been through in life, maybe sometimes it is going to depende of how has been our own experience.
-"core ideas and inquiries within a discipline", this means that the questions must be related with big topics that can go beyond what we expect and they are not only techincal answers that must be learnt by hard or something like that.
-"Questions that helps students effectively inquire and make sense"this means that this questions help students to reach understanding and let them to join ideas in order to create their own answers.
-"questions that will most engage a specific and diverse set of learners" this means that teachers need to formulate essential questions based on students´ needs and likes.

Thirdly, the text gives different tips of how we can formulate essential questions. The authores identify the importance of choosing a useful topic, which must have different sub topics and questions that are going to be useful to discuss it in class too. Teachers must never choose yes or no questions since they are only useful to observe knowledge but as we know we want to reach understanding and also teachers must be very aware of their students ´performance as critical beings.

To conclude, essential questions must be included in every lesson that we teach, because they are useful to open our students´ mind as a path to reach understanding. Teachers need to use essential questions most of the time as pre activities because they incourage our students to believe that they must be active in the class and that the teacher is just a guide.