“Essential Questions”

Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins on “Essential Questions” In this important new book, backwards curriculum-unit design gurus Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins further explain the use of “essential questions”, including lots of examples. Here is a sampling: • In history and social studies: How can we know what really happened in the past? What is worth fighting for? Whose “story” is it? • In mathematics: When and why should we estimate? 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? • In language arts: Why am I writing? For whom? How do effective writers hook and hold their readers? How are stories about other places and times about me? • In science: How are structure and function related in living things? Is aging a disease? How do we decide what to believe about a scientific claim? • In the arts: What influences creative expression? What’s the difference between a thoughtful and a thoughtless critique? If practice makes perfect, what makes perfect practice? • In world languages: What should I do in my head when trying to learn a language? How do native speakers differ, if at all, from fluent foreigners? How can I sound more like a native speaker? How can I explore and describe cultures without stereotyping them? McTighe and Wiggins believe good essential questions have seven key characteristics: They are open-ended; there isn’t a single, final, correct answer. They are thought-provoking and intellectually engaging, often sparking discussion and debate. They call for higher-order thinking – analysis, inference, evaluation, and prediction. They point toward important, transferable ideas within (and sometimes across) disciplines. They raise additional questions and encourage further inquiry. They require support and justification, not just an answer. They beg to be revisited over time. McTighe and Wiggins go on to clarify how three kinds of questions are useful in teaching but are not essential: Questions that lead – They point to a single, correct answer – for example, Which letters in the alphabet are vowels? Questions that guide – These are a little more robust than leading questions, but they still point students toward previously targeted knowledge and skills – for example, Can you state Newton’s 2nd Law in your own words? Questions that hook – At the beginning of a lesson or unit, a teacher uses these to grab students’ attention and provoke wonder – for example, a science teacher in an Alaskan village asked students, Are we drinking the same water as our ancestors? Should essential questions be posed at the beginning of every lesson, as some principals require? McTighe and Wiggins think not. Essential questions are designed for the curriculum unit; they are “too complex and multifaceted to be satisfactorily addressed within a single lesson,” they say. “In particular, essential questions are meant to focus on long-term learning and thus be revisited over time, not answered by the end of a class period. Not only would it be difficult to come up with a new EQ for every lesson; the predictable result would be a set of superficial (leading) or, at best, guiding questions.” Why use essential questions? “For the majority of learners,” say McTighe and Wiggins, “school is a place where the teacher has the answers and classroom questions are intended to find out who knows them. Ironically, many teachers signal that this is the game even when they don’t intend to communicate it – for example, by posing questions that elicit only yes/no or single right answers, by calling only on students with raised hands, and by answering their own questions after a brief pause.” Essential questions, on the other hand: Signal that inquiry is a key goal of education; Make it more likely that the unit will be intellectually engaging; Help clarify and prioritize standards; Provide transparency for students (Where are we going with all this?); Encourage and model metacognition; Provide opportunities for intra- and interdisciplinary connections; Support meaningful differentiation. Essential questions are also important in professional learning community discussions of interim assessment results and student work – for example: Are these the results we expected? Why or why not? Are there any surprises? Any anomalies? What does this work reveal about student learning and performance? What patterns of strengths and weaknesses are evident? What misconceptions are revealed? How good is “good enough”? What actions at the teacher, team, school, and district level would improve learning and performance?

 Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins (ASCD, 2013)

 Stephen Anderson