Essential Questions Book Study, Part 2

“Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding” by McTighe and Wiggins goes on to tell how to design essential questions so that students begin to really think critically about the concepts being taught.  They must cause students to think about their own thinking as well as the thinking of others.  Through this process they question current assumptions and make changes and adjustments as their knowledge grows.  Teaching becomes not a destination of learning but a starting point. 

Here are some thoughts from chapter 3 and part of chapter 4:

How do we design essential questions (EQs)?  This chapter has many very helpful suggestions on how to begin to design and implement EQs.  I really like what the author says about unpacking the standard; looking for verbs and nouns, especially repeated nouns.  When we have unpacked standards in the past, we have paid more attention to the verbs, but looking at the reoccurring nouns helps to identify important concepts that we need students to be questioning and exploring. 

The author also tells us to look at what the desired understandings are and then consider certain categories like: concepts, themes, issues and debates, paradox, etc.  These understandings need to become the basis of our EQs. The author suggests using the writing process to refine our EQs.  The power of peer feedback and revision is just as important for teachers as we have seen it with our students in their own writing.

The beginning of chapter 4 gives several extremely useful models of how to implement and use EQs in a variety of contents and grade levels.  A 4-phase process is outlined and an 8-phase process is also outlined with examples of each.  This helped me to see how EQs should be introduced to students and how to get the most out of their use.