Integrating Teaching and Learning (eBook)

CHAPTER 8

CREATE THE ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS

I remember the following Essential Question created by Gary Colburn and his table colleagues during one of my workshops years ago at Harrison School, Stockton Unified School District, in Stockton, California:

“Why can’t I write something only once?”

By use of this question, Gary and his colleagues were later able to lead their students to the discovery of this Big Idea about the value of the writing process, stated in the students’ own words:

“Writing takes a lot of rewriting. The first time you write is not the last!”

Imagine the gratitude of every educator in later grades who no longer had to persuade and cajole students to work through the steps of the writing process because those students had already realized the reason for doing so in a prior grade!

The central purpose of Essential Questions is to motivate students to engage in their learning. A thoughtfully worded question posed to students by the teacher, with the expectation that they will think and respond, encourages active listening versus passive inattention. It is much easier to “tune out” the voice of a teacher lecturing than it is to “tune in” to an instructional and thought-provoking dialogue that requires active participation by the learner.

At some point in my long and fulfilling career as a classroom educator, I began “telling” less and “asking” more. I realized I was working harder than many of my students, doing too much of their thinking for them.

When I began transferring more of the responsibility for their learning to them—by posing worthwhile questions and waiting for them to think and reply—they became more responsive. In time, many students who had been quiet and less attentive to classroom instruction and related activities became more interested and involved. They began asking their own questions about whatever we were learning instead of just answering mine.

Essential Questions, like their accompanying Big Ideas, are “timeless essentials” to include in the creation of integrated units of study. Together, they characterize this reciprocal relationship between teaching and learning expressed here: Big Ideas are the students’ responses to the teacher’s Essential Questions. This relationship is reflected in the following definition of Essential Questions:

CHAPTER SECTIONS, PART 1:

• Standards-Aligned Essential Questions
• Questions That Blend Surface and Deep Understanding
• Attributes of Effective Questions
• K-12 Examples of Relationship Between Essential Questions and Big Ideas
• “One-Two Punch” Essential Questions
• Examples of “One-Two Punch” Essential Questions and Related Big Ideas

STANDARDS-ALIGNED ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS

Questions to inform instruction and assessment for a particular unit of study are referred to by many names: Guiding Questions, Focus Questions, Enduring Questions, Essential Questions, and others. I prefer the term “Essential Questions” because I see the role of these questions as being essential to advancing student understanding of the standards in focus.

When educators introduce the Essential Questions to students at the beginning of an instructional unit, along with the Student Learning Targets and Success Criteria, they are advertising upfront the set of learning goals they expect students to achieve. Collectively, these “timeless essentials” that make learning intentions explicit to students are, as shown in previous chapters, “associated with greater than average student learning gains” (Hattie, 2009 and 2012).

Essential Questions are not ordinary questions. Because they are derived from the “unwrapped” Essential Standards, they are, in truth, standards-aligned questions. Here are a few key excerpts from my previous publication about the importance of Essential Questions:

Educators use the Essential Questions and ‘unwrapped’ concepts, skills, and levels of cognitive rigor as reference points for the unit assessments they create, making sure that their assessment questions directly align with these elements. After the end-of-unit assessment is designed, they use the Essential Questions and ‘unwrapped’ concepts, skills, and levels of cognitive rigor as instructional filters for planning lessons and learning activities that will advance student understanding toward those end learning goals.

As students move through the lessons and activities, they are developing their understanding of the ‘unwrapped’ concepts and skills and formulating their realization of the Big Ideas. The oral and written responses students give through formal and informal assessments aligned to the Essential Questions provide credible evidence as to what degree the students are achieving the Essential Standards upon which they are based. The degree to which students demonstrate proficiency on the unit assessments determines the degree to which they have learned the ‘unwrapped’ concepts and skills of the Essential Standards for that unit (2014, pp. 81-82).

QUESTIONS THAT BLEND SURFACE AND DEEP UNDERSTANDING

Educators use questioning techniques to engage students and evoke insightful responses from them, but the questions need to represent a blend of surface knowledge and deep understanding, as I wrote here:

It is the ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions educators ask that will always move student thinking to a higher level, because ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions require the learner to process the information in any number of ways. This is not to undermine the value of students acquiring a knowledge base through the judicious use of ‘who, what, where, and when’ questions posed by the teacher. The problem is that too often learning can stop with lower-level recall if educators do not deliberately ask higher-level questions. When this is the case, students accumulate a body of facts but are not shown how to extend their knowledge into the interpretative, synthesis, evaluative, and creative levels. It is in these higher levels that students integrate the new information they are studying with their own prior knowledge, make connections to other areas of study, and learn how to reason, infer, and draw insightful conclusions (2014, p. 82).

In Visible Learning for Teachers (2012), John Hattie states that expert teachers create classroom climates “in which error is welcomed, in which student questioning is high, in which engagement is the norm” (p. 26). He cites a study by Brualdi (1998) who counted between 200 and 300 questions asked by each teacher per day, but the majority of those were low-level cognitive questions: 60 percent recall of facts, 20 percent procedural. Hattie concludes: “More effort needs to be given to framing questions that are worth asking, ones that open the dialogue in the classroom so that teachers can ‘hear’ students’ suggested strategies” (p. 75).

Hattie also cites the research of Rich Mayer and his colleagues (Mayer, 2004 and 2009; Mayer, et al., 2009). They studied educators “using questioning in classes to promote active learning [so] that students attend to relevant material, mentally organize the selected material, and integrate the material with prior knowledge so that they advance in their knowing and understanding” (Hattie, 2012, p. 75).

ATTRIBUTES OF EFFECTIVE QUESTIONS

Here a few attributes or characteristics of effective questions for educators to keep in mind when they are drafting and refining their own Essential Questions:

• Cannot be answered with a “yes” or “no”
• No single obvious right answer
• Cannot be answered from rote memory (simple recall of facts)
• Match the rigor of the “unwrapped” Essential Standard
• Go beyond who, what, when, and where to how and why

Questions that cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” or with the mere recall of facts indeed demand more of students. These questions can set the purpose for learning that requires students to think, make connections, draw conclusions, and justify their responses with supporting details.

In his ageless article, “What Is a Good Guiding Question?” (1998), Rob Traver of the Massachusetts Department of Education offers these characteristics of guiding (essential) questions:

• Open-ended, yet they focus inquiry into a specific topic.
• Non-judgmental, but answering them requires high-level cognitive work.
• Contain “emotive force” and “intellectual bite,” such as “Whose America is it?” and “When are laws fair?”
• Succinct—a handful of words that demand a lot.

K-12 EXAMPLES OF RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS AND BIG IDEAS

Essential Questions and their corresponding Big Ideas share an intentional relationship: The educator asks students the Essential Questions, and the students reply with the Big Ideas. I have...