What is an Essential (the big) Question?
Information About Essential Questions Created by Rene Essex and Marilyn
Lott NEISD
- Important way to bring teacher, student curriculum together in a way that enriches all of them
- Probe for deeper meaning and sets stage for further critical thinking
- Center around major issues, concerns, interests, or themes relevant to students’ lives or community
- Questions that spark the imagination
- Open-ended; non-judgmental
- Collaborative
- Strong, emotive forces
- Encourage collaboration
- Encourage knowledge worth understanding
- Intergenerational
- Deeper meaning
- Sets stage for further questions
- Who? What? When? Where? How? Why?
- Questions that require you to make a decision or plan a course of action
- It avoids “What is?” questions. Instead asks stratifying questions.
- Begins
with “How can….” How should…..”
Example:
Essential Questions offer the organizing focus for a unit. If the U.S. History class will spend a month on a topic such as the Civil War, students explore the events and the experience with a mind toward casting light upon one of the following questions, or they develop Essential Questions of their own:
- Why do we have to fight wars?
- Do we have to fight wars?
- How could political issues or ideas ever become more important than family loyalties?
- Some say our country remains wounded by the slavery experience and the Civil War. In what ways might this claim be true and in what ways untrue? What evidence can you supply to substantiate your case?
- Military officers often complain that the effective conduct of modern war is impeded by political interference and popular pressures on the home front. To what extent did this also prove true during the Civil War?
- How can countries avoid the kind of bloodshed and devastation we experienced during our Civil War?
- How much diversity can any nation tolerate?
- Who showed greater bravery and courage, the front line soldiers and the nurses who tended to the wounded and dying or the leaders
- of the war effort?
- Should
there be a law against war profiteering?
Examples of essential questions:
- Must a story have a moral? A beginning, middle, and end? Heroes and villains?
- Did Gorbachev undermine or fulfill the promises of the Revolution?
- Is geometry more like map-making and using a map, or inventing and playing games like chess? Were theorems invented or discovered?
- Is history a history of progress?
- What makes a family a community?
INTERNET RESOURCES FOR ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
|
Creating
Essential Questions |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Transforming Standards to Understandings |
|
|
|
|
