Essential?

Third in a Series on Understanding by Design: Essential Questions

What makes a question so important that it is essential to ask during a lesson, unit, or semester?  Arriving at an answer to this particular question is no easy task.  You would need to think carefully and ponder long in order to identify questions that are significant enough to reach the level of being essential to student learning.  

Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins, early in their book Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding, include this paragraph penned by Stigler and Stevenson, who studied different approaches to education around the globe:

Teachers ask questions for different reasons in the United States and in Japan. In the United States, the purpose of a question is to get an answer. In Japan, teachers pose questions to stimulate thought. A Japanese teacher considers a question to be a poor one if it elicits an immediate answer, for this indicates that students were not challenged to think. One teacher we interviewed told us of discussions she had with her fellow teachers on how to improve teaching practices. “What do you talk about?” we wondered. “A great deal of time,” she reported, “is spent talking about questions we can pose to the class—which wordings work best to get students involved in thinking and discussing the material. One good question can keep a whole class going for a long time; a bad one produces little more than a simple answer.”

In the rest of their book, McTighe and Wiggins discuss what Essential Questions are and what they can do to improve student learning.  I will only scratch the surface of this topic today, but I want to include a few key concepts from the developers of Understanding by Design. They begin by suggesting a helpful approach is to think of Big Ideas and Essential Questions as the “flip sides of the same coin.”  The Big Ideas are the key concepts, knowledge, and skills that you most fervently hope students will take with them beyond your class and be able to transfer to other contents and to life.  The Essential Questions are the way to unpack the ideas.  As students start to find answers, they deepen their understanding.

Remember that UbD is a lesson planning framework.  It is not prescriptive and gives you lots of freedom and options to use Essential Questions in a variety of ways.  They might be used to hook the learner, to lead the learning during a lesson, to guide the students to focus on key concepts, and/or to stimulate ongoing thinking and inquiry.  They can provide a structure for lessons, units, and even whole courses.  They can be used as the daily or unit objectives.  They can be used as checks for understanding, as discussion starters, or as writing prompts. 

However you choose to use them, to be essential, these questions reach a slightly higher plane than commonly used questions—and even higher than very important questions.  Wiggins and McTighe say Essential Questions…

• Are open-ended and have no simple “right answer”
• Are meant to be investigated, argued, and looked at from different points of view
• Encourage active “meaning making” by the learner about important ideas
• Naturally arise in everyday life, and/or in “doing” the subject
• Constantly and appropriately recur and can be asked and re-asked over time

The Essential Questions are the key questions that students must examine and attempt to answer if they are to come to an understanding of the content to the extent that they can transfer the learning to new situations. 

No question, creating these questions is not an easy task.  When you get it right, however, you take a big step toward increasing student learning.  I started with an excerpt from Stigler and Stevenson about the importance of good questions, but I also discovered many other great minds share their perspective on the importance of questions. 

• The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.  –Thomas Berger
• Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.  –e.e. cummings
• Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and the importance of the question.  –Tennessee Williams
• Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.  –Voltaire
• Successful people ask better questions; they get better answers.  –Tony Robbins
• You don’t want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions.  The questions are diamonds you hold in the light.  Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel.  –Richard Bach
• Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.  –Francis Bacon
• I never learn anything talking.  I only learn things when I ask questions.  –Lou Holtz

Have a great week, HSE.  May it be filled with questions that lead to learning.

Phil

Kudos this week to our media center staff.  I have been in schools where media centers are lifeless places.  Dust collects among the books and whispers are shushed to silence.  That is not the case at HSHS.  Our media center is a place of laughter, deck umbrellas, hard work, good talk, fun, and learning.