More to Teaching…

It’s interesting to see the thought process that goes into teaching a course, as we saw in class on Thursday. Obviously not every teacher uses the same method or puts the same amount of time in their course outline, something that I’ve been able to pick up on over my years as a student. As a teacher I believe that a main goal is to ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to learn and understand the material. This isn’t to say that a class should be taught to the strengths of its weakest student, but to understand the way each student learns the most effectively. On Thursday I picked up on the idea of an essential question – a broad, centralized question related to the course content that can be used to tie back topic questions – and thought about how it can relate to everyone. Since these questions have no one answer, there is no one way to approach them. I believe an essential question can be beneficial to a classroom as a whole, and be advantageous to varied thinking methods.