Essential Questions

Opening Doors to Student Understanding

Jay McTighe, Grant Wiggins

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781416615705
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

What are "essential questions, " and how do they differ from other kinds of questions? What's so great about them? Why should you design and use essential questions in your classroom?

Essential questions (EQs) help target standards as you organize curriculum content into coherent units that yield focused and thoughtful learning. In the classroom, EQs are used to stimulate students' discussions and promote a deeper understanding of the content.

Whether you are an Understanding by Design (UbD) devotee or are searching for ways to address standards—local or Common Core State Standards—in an engaging way, Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins provide practical guidance on how to design, initiate, and embed inquiry-based teaching and learning in your classroom.

Offering dozens of examples, the authors explore the usefulness of EQs in all K-12 content areas, including skill-based areas such as math, PE, language instruction, and arts education. As an important element of their backward design approach to designing curriculum, instruction, and assessment, the authors

*Give a comprehensive explanation of why EQs are so important;
*Explore seven defining characteristics of EQs;
*Distinguish between topical and overarching questions and their uses;
*Outline the rationale for using EQs as the focal point in creating units of study; and
*Show how to create effective EQs, working from sources including standards, desired understandings, and student misconceptions.

Using essential questions can be challenging—for both teachers and students—and this book provides guidance through practical and proven processes, as well as suggested "response strategies" to encourage student engagement. Finally, you will learn how to create a culture of inquiry so that all members of the educational community—students, teachers, and administrators—benefit from the increased rigor and deepened understanding that emerge when essential questions become a guiding force for learners of all ages.

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Chapter 1

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What Makes a Question Essential?

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Teachers regularly pose questions to their students, but the purpose and form of these questions can vary widely. This book is about a particular kind of question—one we call “essential.” So, what makes a question “essential”? Let us begin by engaging you in a bit of inquiry using the following concept-attainment exercise to examine the characteristics of an essential question. The exercise has three parts, as explained in the next several paragraphs.

First, examine the questions below and try to determine the distinguishing characteristics of the ones labeled “Essential” compared to those labeled “Not Essential.” What traits do the essential questions have in common? How do they differ from the others?

Essential Question: How do the arts shape, as well as reflect, a culture?
Not Essential Question: What common artistic symbols were used by the Incas and the Mayans?

Essential Question: What do effective problem solvers do when they get stuck?
Not Essential Question: What steps did you follow to get your answer?

Essential Question: How strong is the scientific evidence?
Not Essential Question: What is a variable in scientific investigations?

Essential Question: Is there ever a “just” war?
Not Essential Question: What key event sparked World War I?

Essential Question:How can I sound more like a native speaker?
Not Essential Question: What are common Spanish colloquialisms?

Essential Question: Who is a true friend?
Not Essential Question: Who is Maggie's best friend in the story?

Second, look at these additional examples, organized by subject area, to spark your thinking and clarify the qualities of essential questions, or EQs.

Essential Questions in History and Social Studies

• Whose “story” is this?
• How can we know what really happened in the past?
• How should governments balance the rights of individuals with the common good?
• Should _______ (e.g., immigration, media expression) be restricted or regulated? When? Who decides?
• Why do people move?
• Why is that there? (geography)
• What is worth fighting for?

Essential Questions in Mathematics

• When and why should we estimate?
• Is there a pattern?
• How does what we measure influence how we measure? How does how we measure influence what we measure (or don't measure)?
• What do good problem solvers do, especially when they get stuck?
• How accurate (precise) does this solution need to be?
• What are the limits of this math model and of mathematical modeling in general?

Essential Questions in Language Arts

• What do good readers do, especially when they don't comprehend a text?
• How does what I am reading influence how I should read it?
• Why am I writing? For whom?
• How do effective writers hook and hold their readers?
• What is the relationship between fiction and truth?
• How are stories from other places and times about me?

Essential Questions in Science

• What makes objects move the way they do?
• How are structure and function related in living things?
• Is aging a disease?
• Why and how do scientific theories change?
• How can we best measure what we cannot directly see?
• How do we decide what to believe about a scientific claim?

Essential Questions in the Arts

• What can artworks tell us about a culture or society?
• What influences creative expression?
• To what extent do artists have a responsibility to their audiences?
• Do audiences have any responsibility to artists?
• What's the difference between a thoughtful and a thoughtless critique?
• If practice makes perfect, what makes perfect practice?

Essential Questions in World Languages

• What should I do in my head when trying to learn a language?
• How can I express myself when I don't know all the words (of a target language)?
• What am I afraid of in hesitating to speak this language? How can I overcome my hesitancy?
• How do native speakers differ, if at all, from fluent foreigners? How can I sound more like a native speaker?
• How much cultural understanding is required to become competent in using a language?
• How can I explore and describe cultures without stereotyping them?

As a result of comparing essential and nonessential questions and studying the additional examples, you should now have an idea of what makes a question “essential.” Here are seven defining characteristics. A good essential question

1. Is open-ended; that is, it typically will not have a single, final, and correct answer.
2. Is thought-provoking and intellectually engaging, often sparking discussion and debate.
3. Calls for higher-order thinking, such as analysis, inference, evaluation, prediction. It cannot be effectively answered by recall alone.
4. Points toward important, transferable ideas within (and sometimes across) disciplines.
5. Raises additional questions and sparks further inquiry.
6. Requires support and justification, not just an answer.
7. Recurs over time; that is, the question can and should be revisited again and again.

How does your working definition compare?

Questions that meet all or most of these criteria qualify as essential. These are questions that are not answerable with finality in a single lesson or a brief sentence—and that's the point. Their aim is to stimulate thought, to provoke inquiry, and to spark more questions, including thoughtful student questions, not just pat answers. They are provocative and generative. By tackling such questions, learners are engaged in uncovering the depth and richness of a topic that might otherwise be obscured by simply covering it.

Now we present the third part of the concept-attainment exercise. Using the characteristics we presented and those that you noted, which of the following questions do you think are essential? Why?

1. In what year was the Battle of Hastings fought?
Is it Essential? Yes/No

2. How do effective writers hook and hold their readers?
Is it Essential? Yes/No

3. Is biology destiny?
Is it Essential? Yes/No

4. Onomatopoeia—what's up with that?
Is it Essential? Yes/No

5. What are examples of animals adapting to their environment?
Is it Essential? Yes/No

6. What are the limits of arithmetic?
Is it Essential? Yes/No

Check your answers against the key. How did you do? Are you getting a better feel for what makes a question essential? Good! Now we'll probe more deeply to uncover the nuances of EQs.

Two Sides of a Coin

Although we have characterized essential questions as being important for stimulating student thinking and inquiry, this is not their sole function. In the body of work known as Understanding by Design (McTighe & Wiggins, 2004; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, 2007, 2011, 2012), we propose that education should strive to develop and deepen students' understanding of important ideas and processes so that they can transfer their learning within and outside school. Accordingly, we recommend that content (related goals) be unpacked to identify long-term transfer goals and desired understandings. Part of this unpacking involves the development of associated essential questions. In other words, EQs can be used to effectively frame our key learning goals. For example, if a content standard calls for students to learn about the three branches of government, then questions such as “When does a government overstep its authority?” or “How might we guard against governmental abuses of power?” help stimulate student thinking about why we need checks and balances, what the framers of the Constitution were trying to achieve, and other governmental approaches to balancing power. Note that the question has more than one answer, even if in the United States we have grown accustomed to our particular answer. In this sense, the question is still open, not closed.

We'll have more to say about how to come up with good essential questions in later chapters, but for now try this simple thought experiment. If the content you are expected to teach represents “answers,” then what questions were being asked by the people who came up with those answers? This conceptual move offers a useful strategy both for seeing a link between content standards and important questions and for coming up with ways of engaging students in the very kind of thinking that is required to truly understand the content. In short, expert knowledge is the result of inquiry, argument, and difference of opinion; the best questions point to hard-won big ideas that we want learners to come to understand. The questions thus serve as doorways or lenses through which learners can better see and explore the key concepts, themes, theories, issues, and problems that reside within the content.

It is also through the process of actively “interrogating” the content using provocative questions that students strengthen and deepen their understanding. For instance, a regular consideration of the question “How are stories from different places and times about me?” can lead students to the big ideas that great literature explores—the universal themes of the human condition underneath the more obvious peculiarities of personality or culture—and thus can help us gain insight into our own experiences. Similarly, the question “To what extent can people accurately predict the future?” serves as a launch pad for examining big ideas in statistics and science, such as sampling variables, predictive validity, degrees of confidence, and correlation versus causality.

At a practical level, think of targeted understandings and essential questions as the flip sides of the same coin. Our essential questions point toward important transferable ideas that are worth understanding, even as they provide a means for exploring those ideas. This associated relationship is suggested graphically in the Understanding by Design (UbD) unit-planning template, where targeted understandings are placed next to their companion essential questions. Here are some examples:

Understanding: The geography, climate, and natural resources of a region influence the economy and lifestyle of the people living there.
Essential Question: How does where you live influence how you live?

Understanding: Statistical analysis and data display often reveal patterns. Patterns enable prediction.
Essential Question: What will happen next? How sure are you?

Understanding: People have different dietary needs based on age, activity level, weight, and various health considerations.
Essential Question: How can a diet that is “healthy” for one person be unhealthy for another?

Understanding: Dance is a language of shape, space, timing, and energy that can communicate ideas and feelings.
Essential Question: How can motion express emotion?

Three Connotations of Essential

A finer-grained examination of such questions reveals three different but overlapping meanings for the term essential. One meaning of essential includes the terms “important” and “timeless.” Essential questions in this sense arise naturally and recur throughout one's life. Such questions are broad in scope and universal by nature. What is justice? Is art a matter of taste or principles? How much should we tamper with our own biology and chemistry? Is science compatible with religion? Is an author's view privileged in determining the meaning of a text? Essential questions of this type are common and perpetually arguable. We may arrive at or be helped to grasp understandings for these questions, but we soon learn that answers to them are provisional or more varied than we might have imagined. In other words, we are liable to change our minds in response to reflection, different views, and rich experience concerning such questions as we go through life—and such changes of mind are not only expected but beneficial. A good education is grounded in such lifelong questions, even if we sometimes lose sight of them while focusing on content mastery. Such questions signal that education is not just about learning “the answer” but also about learning how to think, question, and continually learn.

A second connotation for essential refers to “elemental” or “foundational.” Essential questions in this sense reflect the key inquiries within a discipline. Such questions point to the big ideas of a subject and to the frontiers of technical knowledge. They are historically important and very much alive in the field. The question “Is any history capable of escaping the social and personal history ...