1. Opening Doors to Student Understanding
Essential Questions
Opening Doors to Student Understanding
Based on the text Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins

2. What Makes a Question Essential?
Seven Defining Characteristics
Is open-ended
Is thought provoking & intellectually engaging
Calls for higher-order thinking
Points toward important, transferable ideas
Raises additional questions
Requires support and justification
Recurs over time

3. Three Connotations of Essential
Important and Timeless: arise naturally and recur throughout life, are common and arguable
Elemental and Foundational:
Vital or Necessary for personal understanding

4. Why Use Essential Questions?
Essential questions make our unit plans more likely to yield focused and thoughtful learning and learners

5. Why Use Essential Questions?
Signal that inquiry is a key goal of education
Make it more likely that the unit will be intellectually engaging
Help to clarify and prioritize standards for teachers.
Provide transparency for students
Encourage and model metacognition for students
Provide opportunities for intra- and interdisciplinary connections
Support meaningful differentiation

6. Why Use Essential Questions?
Essential questions provide transparency for students.
The right questions, made transparent from the start of a unit, help students’ ability to make meaning, learn effectively, and create worthy products and performances based on their inquiries.

7. Why Use Essential Questions?
Essential questions can provide opportunities for intra- and interdisciplinary connections.
To what extent do the arts and sciences reflect an era?
What can we learn from studying the past?
The connecting power of essential questions becomes even greater if the units are also framed by process-focused questions.
What information will address this question?
How do I find out what I don’t know?
How will I know what to believe in the information I find?
Is there another perspective I should consider?
What is the best way to show what I have learned?

8. Why Use Essential Questions?
Carol Ann Tomlinson recommends that teachers show all of their students respect for their capacity to learn.
A practical way to do this is through the regular use of EQs.
By posing the same essential questions for a class, we signal to students that we respect their intelligence and capacity to think.

9. Why Use Essential Questions?
Yes, but……what about PASS testing?
An educator’s job is not to simply cover content.
Our role is to cause learning, not merely to mention things.
Our task is to uncover the important ideas and processes of the content so that students are able to make helpful connections and are equipped to transfer learning in meaningful ways.
If we wish to engage learners in making meaning of the learning so that they come to understand it, then essential questions will serve the cause of mastery of content.

10. Why Use Essential Questions?
Research shows that increasing the number of higher order questions in classrooms and on local assessments significantly improves student achievement on standardized tests.
Because understanding and transfer demand active construction of meaning by the learner, and because long-term and flexible recall requires an intellectual framework of ideas in which to place content knowledge, only students who have learned for understanding can perform well on rigorous tests.

11. Why use Essential Questions?
Discuss page 27 of Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins

12. How do we design Essential Questions?
Text-based discussion protocol using Tool 36 from Quality Performance Assessments: A Guide for Schools and Districts by the Center for Collaborative Education
Chps. 1 and 3

13. How do we use Essential questions?
Teachers must build a culture in their classroom that supports intellectual risk taking.
Teachers should value thoughtful, not thoughtless, responses to questions

14. How do we use Essential questions?
Read paragraph on page 43 beginning with Teachers ask questions.
How do you feel about the differences between Japan and the United States? Discuss

15. How do we use Essential questions?
Successful implementation of EQ starts with clear and explicit goals.
Essential questions should be used to spark discussions, not a hunt for the right answer.

16. Key ideas to communicate to students
There’s not a single correct answer
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion
Everyone in the class is fair game…(the teacher doesn’t just call on students with their hand raised)
It is ok to challenge someone else’s opinion
Making mistakes is ok and a part of learning

17. Four phases for implementing essential questions
Phase 1: Introduce a question designed to cause inquiry.
Goal: Make sure the EQ is thought provoking and relevant to the student and the course content.
Phase 2: Elicit various responses and question them.
Goal: Use questioning strategies to gather many different, yet plausible answers from your students.

18. Four phases for implementing essential questions
Phase 3: Introduce and explore new perspectives.
Goal: Bring new text, data, or phenomena to the inquiry, designed to deliberately extend inquiry or call into question tentative conclusions.
Phase 4: Reach tentative closure.
Goal: Ask students to generalize their findings and new learning in the context of the course content.

19. A closer look at essential questions
Pre-instructional planning and design
Initial posing of the question
Eliciting of varied student responses
Probing those responses
Introduction of new information and perspectives
In-depth and sustained inquiry culminating in products or
performance
7) Tentative closure
8) Assessment of individual student inquiry and answers

20. Response strategies to essential questions
Wait Time
Think-Pair-Share
Random Calling
Class Survey
More Than One Answer
Probes for Thinking and Support
Devil’s Advocate

21. How do we establish a culture of inquiry in classrooms?
Eight elements within our control that underlie and support a classroom culture of inquiry
Element 1: Nature of Learning Goals
If understanding and critical thinking are among the desired outcomes, do our curriculum and assessments reflect these goals?
In depth thinking is required for success
Higher order questions are essential

22. How do we establish a culture of inquiry in classrooms?
3 types of learning goals (Page 84)
Acquisition—Acquire factual information
Meaning Making—Construct meaning(Come to an understanding)
Transfer****
Read paragraph 1 on pages 84 to 85

23. How do we establish a culture of inquiry in classrooms?
Tips to making learning goals explicit and clear (page 85)
Post EQs prominently around the room, refer to regularly
Write out learning goals for the year
Plan units, separate goals into the 3 groups
Post different types of EQs and discuss with students
Discussion rubrics for EQs

24. How do we establish a culture of inquiry in classrooms?
Element 2: The Roles of Questions, Teachers, & Students
The question has to become more important that the answer
The teacher must become a facilitator and co-inquirer
Students must become their own teachers, increasingly responsible for their own progress

25. How do we establish a culture of inquiry in classrooms?
Element #3: Explicit Protocols and Codes of Conduct
Element #4: Safe and Supportive Environment
Tone of voice
Wait time
# higher order ?s vs lower level ?s
Reactions to student comments
Element #5: Use of Space and Physical Resources
Circles facilitate conversations
Element #6: Use of Time in and out of Class
Plan time in your lessons
Element #7: Use of Texts and Other Learning Resources
Element #8: Assessment practices

26. How do we establish a culture of inquiry in classrooms?
Element #7: Use of Texts and Other Learning Resources
Read top of page 96
Element #8: Assessment practices
What gets measured get done.
Must assess students’ ability to question, probe and to respond to higher level questions with evidence and argument.
Read page 97… A truly hardworking, analytical discussion….