Essential Questions

As I read the chapter “Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding”  I realized that many educators I know have an erroneous understanding of what essential questions are and how to use them.  For instance, I can remember the middle school principal I worked with encouraging me to post essential questions on my board.  I didn’t know what they were, and he explained them as what you want the students to get out of the lesson, that is the objectives, posed in question form.  So my initial forays into composing essential questions looked something like “How do we use semicolons?”  Where is the opportunity for intense inquiry in that?.
All of us have some line of inquiry, some essential questions, that we haven’t answered yet.  For example, one of mine might be “What teaching methods and practices will most engage my students and enable them to leave my class, as our school’s mission statement promises, a ‘knowledgeable, thinking, responsible, Jewish adult’?”  In posing essential questions of this type, we teach our student that “education is not just about learning ‘the answer’ but about learning how to learn” (108).  In our culture, we often nail politicians for “waffling” when they change their minds about something.  If we were really teaching our students how to think, as adults they might realize that “we are likely to change our minds in response to reflection and experience concerning such questions as we go through life, and changes of mind are not only expected but beneficial” (108).
This chapter ends with a bang in terms of thought provoking ideas.  “Our students need a curriculum that treats them more like potential performers than sideline observers” (122).  Students describe school or classes as something to get through.  No wonder!  They  aren’t really often asked to participate in it, to use what they know or think about what they’re learning beyond regurgitating for a test!  I want my class to be a class that students will say is challenging and makes them think about things in new ways.  One quibble I have always had with RateMyTeachers.com and the similar RateMyProfessors.com is that one of their criteria for a good teacher is an easy class.  In what way do we learn anything, and therefore by extension can we say a teacher is good if we are only after an easy class, which really means an easy A?  Is that all we care about?  That grade?  Well, yes, it can be.  We have all been frustrated, I’m sure, at one time or another by hearing “Is this going to be on the test? Is this what you want?  How long does the paper have to be?” (122).  What we need to do, then, is step back and see whether we have created a class based on “an unending stream of leading questions” (122).
We sometimes send students the message that getting through the content is more important than their own questions.  We have trained students that not to know something and be curious about it is risky.
The thought that struck me as I finished the chapter is that students learn in spiteof school too often, and not because of school.

Chapter 3: Gaining Clarity on Our Goals

The chapter describes and summarizes the terms “Established Goals, Understandings, Essential Questions, Knowledge, and Skills” (56). I too found the idea of deciding what is “worth an adult’s knowing, and whether having known it as a child makes a person a better adult,” to be particularly insightful.

Essential questions highlights the BIG IDEAS that are central to the design; ideas that the work will require students to address. By asking for "Essential Questions" designers are encouraged to avoid coverage and to commit to genuine inquiry — the discussion, reflection, problem solving, research, and debate that are the requisites for developing deep understanding of essential ideas.

Wiggins and McTighe go on to discuss the difference between “big ideas” and “basics.” Here I like the authors’ statement that “we need a ‘preponderance of evidence’ in order to ‘convict’ a student of meeting stated goals” (69). In other words, we must make sure students have mastered content standards through a wide variety of measurements before we can say they are definitely guilty of “understanding” content.

We have to help students to "learn how to learn" and "how to perform. Both have a vital mission when we teach. On the other hand, mastery of content is not the AIM of instruction, but a means. Understandings have to be inferred from well-designed and well-facilitated experiences, whereas a good deal of knowledge can be acquired from readings or lectures.

        Because BIG IDEAS are inherently transferable, they help to connect discrete topics and skills. Big ideas may be thought of as a linchpin (the device that keeps the wheel in place on the axle).

        The challenge is to identify a few BIG IDEAS and carefully design around them, resisting the temptation to teach everything of possible value for each topic.

         Some BIG IDEAS are:

                      Broad and abstract;

                      Represented by one or two words;

                      Universal in application;

                     Timeless;

                      Represented by different examples that share common attributes.

   

     What is big to the teacher or the expert in the field is often abstract, lifeless, confusing or irrelevant to the student. Indeed the challenge of teaching for understanding is largely the challenge of making the big ideas in the field become big in the mind of the learner.

         Authentic challenges involve realistic situations, where the context of the task is as faithful as possible to the real-world opportunities and difficulties. Transfer involves expertly addressing authentic challenges at core tasks, where the content is a means. Tasks can be ranked by the degree of independent reach by the learner in completing them: "far transfer", "near transfer", "Minimal transfer" and no transfer, but simple recall.

In terms of “finding big ideas,” the authors suggested two tips in particular that I think will be useful: “look carefully at state standards” and “circle key recurring nouns in standards documents to highlight big ideas and the recurring verbs to identify core tasks” (73-74). The authors remind us again that we are experts as teachers, and the “Expert Blind Spot” can prevent us from making big ideas obvious to students. We need to think like students in order to help them grasp big ideas and truly understand the content.