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.