Written by Do you provide your students with essential questions before launching into a new unit of study? Do you always create the questions, or do you allow students to come with and explore the questions themselves?
When I began teaching in the independent school system ten years ago, I was introduced to Understanding by Design during my first August PD session, and since then I apply this concept to every course and unit I plan and teach. In the early years I remember lamenting over the exemplars we were provided with, which always neatly presented a science or history course from its initial Essential Questions, to the final task learning outcomes, and finally down to the daily teaching & assessment strategies, and possible differentiation models. I had a hard time connecting with these content-rich courses, when I felt I essentially had carte blanche to determine my course content but needed to frame my students’ learning around skills acquisition in communication (speaking, reading, writing and listening) in French.
I was excited when I came across the following American concept of language learning, called the 5 C’s of Communication: 
It helped shape a general set of essential questions which I consider every time I plan a new unit of study:
*Adapted from the 5 C’s of Foreign Language Learning (AASLT)
Here is a snapshot of the specific essential questions I recently shared on my gr. 12 LMS page related to our current theme/unit of study (Culture and the Great Upheaval):
I came across this blogpost claiming that when teachers develop the essential questions for their courses, they do not guarantee that all students will engage as much in their learning as if they had been asked to come up with the essential questions themselves. It reminded my of my Action Plan from last year, when I sought to personalize student learning by having them design their final task for a unit that asked them to consider the above essential questions in relation to the course curriculum. This is a peek at how a google moderator voting session turned out with a Grade 10 French class last year:
Now I’m starting to ask myself: should I be throwing it out there to students to not only attempt to answer an essential question or two through the course of a unit, but to actually consider the theme I’ve chosen and create the questions themselves? Perhaps throw up a few leading questions on Moderator and see where it goes? I sometimes feel a great deal of responsibility for the direction I’m leading students, since our curriculum (yet to be revised and promising for the past 3 years to provide more guidance in this area!!!) dictates that we provide a variety of opportunities and ways for students to practice their communication skills, but no specific guidance on the content through which we teach these skills.
I can’t help but think that the majority of my grade 12 students, who are so concerned lately with their university applications and marks, will demand that I provide them with a list of specific questions and the precise learning path to take towards the final evaluation. Has anyone taken this leap? Can you give me some examples, and let me know how it turned out? I’m embarking on a Modern Art unit to coincide with the AGO exhibition and it seems like the right time to try something avant-garde (… for me!)
Hi Jen,
Great post here – lots of food for thought! I think that providing a theme and having students develop the questions is a great idea! However, the nature of Wiggins and McTighe’s essential questions are that they are rooted in the curriculum, and so you’d have to do a fair bit of training, modeling and practice.
That is why I really like the idea of GoogleModerator. This gives them an opportunity to see really good questions – and I wouldn’t be shy, as a teacher, to use their examples and elaborate on them to show them how to craft these questions too. By the way, Socrative has a similar voting feature too…
From Grant Wiggins website: http://www.authenticeducation.org/ae_bigideas/article.lasso?artid=53
A question is essential when it:
causes genuine and relevant inquiry into the big ideas and core content;
provokes deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and new understanding as well as more questions;
requires students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support their ideas, and justify their answers;
stimulates vital, on-going rethinking of big ideas, assumptions, and prior lessons;
sparks meaningful connections with prior learning and personal experiences;
naturally recurs, creating opportunities for transfer to other situations and subjects.
Note that an essential question is different from many of the questions teachers typically ask students in class. The most commonly asked question type is factual – a question that seeks “the” correct answer. For example, in a history class, teachers are constantly asking questions to elicit recall or attention to some important content knowledge: “When did the war break out? Who was President at the time? Why, according to the text, did Congress pass that bill?”
Such questions are clearly not “essential” in the sense discussed above. Rather, they are what we might call ‘teacherly’ questions – a question essential to a teacher who wants students to know an important answer.
Is such a leading question bad? No. There are all sorts of good pedagogical reasons for using a question format to underscore knowledge or to call attention to a forgotten or overlooked idea. But those questions are not “essential” in the sense of signaling genuine, important and necessarily-ongoing inquiries. Teachers have to be careful not to conflate two ideas: “essential to me in my role as a teacher” and “essential to anyone as a thinking person and inquiring student for making meaning of facts in this subject.”
I hope that these ideas help,
garth.
Hi Garth,
Thanks for your reply. I revised this post (in blue) and added the specific essential questions for a current Grade 12 unit of study that got me thinking about writing this post in the first place. I think these questions fall under the “essential” category to which you are referring, but I still question whether I should be the one asking them! Since Grant Wiggins is a former French teacher, I’ve always wished he would provide more specific guidance in this area.
Jen, this is amazing! I have always wondered about how essential questions are developed and, how to articulate why they still need to be developed, even if they are truly ‘essential’.
Can you tell me a bit about how ‘reading’ and ‘reading/writing’ are related? I like the sound of them being distinct…
Hi Adam,
Great question! Reading on its own falls under the category of interpretive communication (a student’s sole interpretation), and reading/writing is part of interpersonal communication, where a student interprets something they’ve read and then communicates their understanding with someone else. A recent example from my class was reading a French article about the Senate scandal, then writing an e-mail to a chosen senator to express what they think of the situation (and including examples of what they’ve gleaned from the article in their writing, and a bit of the subjunctive, a grammar concept they’re learning, for good measure!)
Jen – Let me know how this works with your 12’s. I am very curious. I often give a lot of choice for a final unit product, but have never started a unit with having students think about what Essential Understandings are important. I think at the senior level it would be a lot of good conversation and hopefully students could “create their own adventure” for the unit!