Educational Leadership - September 2015

Tip: Start by making a concept web for the topics of the unit. Identify the hard-to-understand but vital connections of ideas. Make sure your question points to the ideas identified, suggests interesting inquiries, and helps uncover the powerful ideas. Ask yourself, What does this idea help us make sense of? How does it help us connect the dots of our learning?

4. Is the question general enough to use
across other units? Or is it bound too
narrowly to just this topic or text?

We want a question that rewards us
for revisiting it. Here’s a draft question,
based on a reading of one of the stories
in Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad
series: How do Frog and Toad act like
friends? By revising the question to
this—Who is a true friend?—we can
connect to varied texts and to personal
experience. In addition to making us
question the question—What do we
mean by true friend?—this revised
query recurs over and over throughout
our lives, in history and psychology
as well as in literature. The genius of
Lobel is that Frog and Toad sometimes
don’t act like friends, which deepens
the inquiry.

Here’s another example showing the virtue of a more general focus. The question, Why did we fight in Vietnam, and was it worth it? sets a more helpful agenda for a history course when we revise it to read, Why have we gone to war? When was it wise, and when was it foolish?

Tip: Avoid mentioning or edit out the specific topic in the question. Don’t mention specific books, events, or facts. Instead, pose the question more generally about concepts such as friendship, war, ecosystems, and so on. We call such questions overarching (Mc Tighe & Wiggins, 2013; Wiggins & Mc Tighe, 2005, 2013).

5. Does the question get at what’s odd, counterintuitive, or easily mis understood? Or is it a predictable question with mundane and relatively superficial answers?

Here are some common first-draft
questions: What’s the difference
between fiction and nonfiction? What’s
a theory in science? What is history?

What can numbers help us do? These questions don’t lead us very far. They call attention to key ideas, but they don’t promote in-depth inquiry.

And frankly, they’re a bit dull and
“teacherly.”
By contrast, successful questions
do just the opposite: They highlight
apparent paradoxes or counter-
intuitive investigations. Here are those
“teacherly” questions revised: When is
fiction revealing, and when is it a lie? If
we can’t see something (gravity, human
evolution, dinosaurs, and so on), how do
we know it is or was there? If history
is the story told by the winners, what
stories aren’t we hearing? What can’t the
language of numbers communicate?

Misconceptions are a rich resource for such questions. For example, a common misconception in physics is the assumption that a ball thrown in the air has two forces acting on it once it leaves the hand: the force from the hand pushing it up and the force of gravity pulling it down. Actually, there’s only one force acting on the ball: the force of gravity. So, a devilishly simple essential question would be, Why does the ball move that way? Not only will you generate interesting and diverse theories, but you’ll uncover misunderstandings.

Tip: Familiarize yourself with the most counterintuitive and commonly misunderstood aspects of the subjects you teach, and build your questions around them. There are countless websites on common student misconceptions for all academic subjects. Simply search for “student misconceptions in ____” in your web browser.