Professional Learning for Busy Educators

The key to teaching for understanding is to foster ongoing inquiry into important “big ideas.” A natural way to actively engage students in such inquiry is to use a few Essential Questions (EQs) to frame a curriculum unit. The explicit use of EQs sends a powerful signal that learning something deeply is about making meaning, not simply the acquisition of factual knowledge and discrete skills.

Essential questions are, ask Grant Wiggins defines, ‘essential’ in the sense of signaling genuine, important and necessarily-ongoing inquiries.” These are grapple-worthy, substantive questions that not only require wrestling with, but are worth wrestling with–that could lead students to some critical insight in a 40/40/40-rule sense of the term.

I collected the following set of questions through the course of creating units of study, most of them from the Greece Central School District in New York. In revisiting them recently, I noticed that quite a few of them were closed/yes or no questions, so I went back and revised some of them, and added a few new ones, something I’ll try to do from time to time.