LEARNING NOTES

TOPIC 5

ESSENTIAL AND UNIT QUESTIONS

An Essential Question is:

A question that lies at the heart of a subject or a curriculum and one that promotes inquiry and
the discovery of a subject.

Essential Questions are critical drivers for teaching and learning. They can help students discover
patterns in knowledge and solve problems.

What constitutes a good essential question?

• In general, the best essential questions center around major issues, problems,
concerns, interests, or themes relevant to students' lives and to their communities.
• Good essential questions are open-ended, non-judgmental, meaningful and
purposeful with emotive force and intellectual bite, and invite an exploration of
ideas.
• Good essential questions encourage collaboration amongst students, teachers, and
the community and integrate technology to support the learning process.

Essential questions can help you show students the meaning in your subject
matter. According to McTighe and Wiggins, essential questions have seven characteristics:

✓ They are open ended,

✓ Thought provoking,
✓ Require higher order thinking,
✓ Point toward big transferable ideas,
✓ Raise additional questions,
✓ Require justification and
✓ Recur over time.

How do we write good essential questions?

Essential questions can make the lesson planning process more effective, but many teachers
struggle to write quality essential questions for their lessons. Read on for a step-by-step guide to
writing essential questions.

1. Choose the Main Concept

The first step to writing essential questions is to write down the main concept that you are trying
to teach your students. Although this may seem obvious at first, many teachers find that once
they write down what they are trying to teach, they realize that they should really be focusing on
something entirely different. For example, a teacher might write that he is trying to teach "the
seven taxonomic ranks in the modern classification system," and then realizes that his main goal
is not for students to memorize these ranks at all. Instead, his goal is for students to understand
the reasons why scientists classify organisms and how they do it.

1 ESEB3393 Differentiated Instruction

 LEARNING NOTES
TOPIC 5

ESSENTIAL AND UNIT QUESTIONS

2. Turn It Into a Question

The next step in writing essential questions is to take the statement and convert it into an actual
question. For example, you might change "the classification of organisms" to "Why do scientists
classify organisms?", "How do scientists classify organisms?", or "What are the classifications of
organisms?" In fact, you may find that one concept can be split into three essential questions.

3. Think Like Your Students

Think about what would interest your students the most about the questions that you write down.
Which of them are the most thought provoking and which of them would seem most important
within the context of your students' lives? The question should also require the students to really
organize their knowledge in order to answer it. In this step, choose the question(s) that seem to
best fit this criteria.

4. Refine the Content of the Question

Remember that an essential question should not have an obvious right answer and the answers
to it should not be simple. Explained in a different way, an essential question cannot be
answered in one sentence, but does not need a whole book to answer it either. Instead, an
essential question should require students to use higher-level thinking skills or form their own
opinions or solutions to problems. It should also target the main concept of the chapter or essay
you are teaching about. In this step, try to tailor your question so that it addresses all of these
concerns.

5. Refine the Wording of the Question

In order for an essential question to be effective, your students will need to be able to easily
understand it and keep it in mind while they learn the information related to it. Students should
never be able to misconstrue an essential question, and all of the students should understand
exactly what it means. For these reasons, the wording of an essential question is incredibly
important. After you adjust the wording slightly to make it as clear as possible, have several other
people read it to make sure that they understand exactly what you are trying to convey.

The process of writing an essential question is often just as important as the question itself.
Clarifying what you want your students to understand about the lesson can ensure that you will
gear your lesson so that your students will actually grasp those important concepts.

2 ESEB3393 Differentiated Instruction