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Using essential questions to organize learning expeditions and individual student research projects.
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Essential Questions
Adapted from Understanding by Design
By Grant WigginsAnd
Jay McTighe
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Design
Copyright © 1998
Essential Questions
1. Represents a big idea
2. Resides at the heart of the discipline
3. Requires uncoverage
4. Potentially engaging for students
If the textbook is the answer. . .
What was the question?
Essential Questions
The characteristic danger of project-based instruction is that it easily degenerates into an incoherent sequence of activities.
Essential Questions
Questions that “pose dilemmas, subvert obvious or canonical “truths” or force incongruities upon our attention.”
Jerome Bruner
• From whose viewpoint are we seeing this?• How do we know when we know? What’s the evidence?• How are things, events, or people connected? What is cause and what is effect?• What’s new and what’s old. Have we encountered this idea before?• So what? Why does it matter?
Deborah Meier
Unit Questions
More topic specific than essential questions:
Essential Question: Who is a friend?
Unit Questions: In A Separate Peace, is Gene a friend to Phineas? Is Phineas a friend to Gene?
Unit Questions
• What were the differences in television news between 1962 and 1968?• How was the 1968 Democratic Convention affected by the Vietnam War? How did this Convention affect America?• How were local veterans personally affected by the Vietnam War?• How did local people on the homefront respond to the turbulence of the 1960s?
Research Questions
Narrow focus appropriate for student research project:
Essential Question: How was America changed by the sixties?
Unit Question: How did people on the homefront experience the 1960s.
Research Question: What does a local veteran say about his experience?
A big idea of enduring value
An idea that is essential for understanding a topic
• The Rule of Law• The Meaning of Loyalty• The Definition of Success
At the heart of the discipline
Involves students in “doing” the discipline, using the same processes as experts
Is history always biased? Does Montana literature reflect our culture, or does it shape it?
Requires uncoverage
Uncover non-obvious meanings
• Question it• Prove it• Generalize it• Connect it• Picture it• Extend it
Requires uncoverage
“Washington had the daring to put [his Patriots] to good use, too, as he broke the rules of war by ordering a surprise attack on the enemy in its winter quarters”
Potential for engaging students
What are the issues adolescents are dealing with?
FriendshipRomantic LoveIndependence
Some topics are too abstract and global
