Essential Questions

In UbD it is suggested to use questions as "doorways through which learners explore key concepts, themes, theories, issues and problems that reside within the content" (106).  Such suggestion makes sense in a contex where students have a high level of autonomy, where the teacher's active role is as guide who helps the students with hints in order to encourage students to discover.  Nevertheless, I dare to say that most of our students lack of such autonomy and expect us to fill them with anwers and not with more questions. This problems is due to decades of instructional education which did not emphasized in developing student's critical thinking and autonomy.  In Chile,  teachers have always been the most important element in the classroom, since they are conceived as the owners of knowledge and the masters to deliver such knowledge to the subdued students.  Thus, trying to implement such an approach that implyies something completely opposed to the learning process of Chilean students is a really difficult task to achieve. Even for teachers to make these essential questions, undoubtebly, becomes difficult at times.

Are we prepared for such a change in Chilean instruction?  We have been witnesses of various unfruitful efforts to start filling our students' world with questions they HAVE to answer. However, as mentioned before, first, us teachers need to be prepared to give such a guidance, and then we can ask our students to think and question the contents. If we ever change our lack of critical thinking, then we can indeed make our students' to develop theirs. In the meantime, we are in the process of making questions for ourselves.

Second entry: Clarity!

As stated in the first entry, planning backwards  presents several difficulties for the teacher to overcome.  One, and the most important I think, is to work in order to fulfil the objectives set before we start the journey. Having long and short-term goals defined with clarity is a really difficult task to achieve, specially if teachers do not have time enough to sit back and reflect on the goals their are seeking to obatain.
Most of teachers work without the clear knowledge of the national curriculum but only the goals of their institutions. However, I think that to have clear objective even within the classroom, we need to look back to the national goals, then institutional, and finally goals set for classes. Only if we follow such reflection teachers can have clear objectives set, thus they are ready to start planning.

Altough this idea sounds perfect for improving our performance as teachers and the education of our students, we must acknowledge the fact that some of this ideas are very difficult to be carried out. Why? I believe teachers spend a lot of time preparing materials and tests and planning  for each class and that has lead to forget the bases for teaching English in Chile: the curriculum.  There is awarness of its existence and also about its flaws, but how  much do teachers know about the goals that have been stablished? Only have such goals in mind first, we can set the content standards for our institutions and classes. However, that is a lot of work to do and if we add  teaching classes it becomes imposible to be carried out.
I do believe is an important work to do, I also believe there should be specialists on the subject, designers, doing such work, though. Designers should only destine their time to study and set goals clearly in order to have teachers planning their classes. Some institutions have such system, but it would be a great benefit for education if it is mass spread.