Gaining Clarity on Our Goals

Long-term priorities, long-term priorities, this chapter keeps saying. Reminds me of my guidance counselor. It's difficult having long-term, intellectual, spiritual goals in class when the school, state, and students' goals seem to be "learn English." 

I very  much enjoy the book's admission that teachers frequently ASSUME students have the necessary subskills required of an activity, such as study skills, teamwork skills, public speaking, et cetera, and that this leads to problems, the least of which are invalid assessments! How can you accurately assess someone's knowledge of a subject if the public speaking part of the presentation is making them fall apart? These are very valuable skills--it could be argued that they're MORE valuable than some of the facts and shit students are expected to learn--and teachers should not fault students for not having them. They must be taught, and school is the perfect place to learn them.

Ah, the standards issue. A hotly debated topic in the US, it is strangely non-partisan, unlike most issues in the US of A. Basically, everyone hates the damn standards. To me, this goes hand in hand with the chapter on Understanding--if you memorise 989,028,298 facts about WW2, do you really understand more about the war? 

How well do the Chilean educational standards for English measure English ability?

And, do the standards include the aforementioned important subskills?

I have other questions with this chapter. For example, the thing about the Essential Questions as a guide for what's important to learn--how can these be applied in EFL?

What would this look like?

What is a "big idea" and "core concept" in terms of learning another language? 

Big idea: Talking about the past

Core concept: -d/-ed endings in simple past

(??? Or what??) 

I agree that essential questions and big ideas are great for choosing what subject matter to view and how to talk about it, but it's a bit confusing to me in terms of applying it to the actual nuts and bolts of English that we must pass along. 

If  the Essential Question is meant to be a guide for learning, do we put the Essential question in Spanish? What if we write it in English and they don't understand it because their level of English is very low? Is it still a useful guide for the student in this case?

This chapter provided me with a lot of good information, but the applicability to EFL teaching is still unclear to me. I hope to be enlightened in later chapters, and from my classmates' blog posts.