Educational Leadership - September 2015

on the first try. Everything we know about the writing and design processes reminds us that this is an unsuccessful approach. We want numerous and diverse ideas at first, jotted down quickly, from which a good one will emerge.

The problem is compounded when writers spend too much time wordsmithing the question instead of trying to generate the best intellectual direction. Don’t try to write and edit simultaneously. Draft a bunch of questions first, then edit. The more versions you draft, the easier the editing will be.

Tip: Use brainstorming rules: Don’t judge (or self-judge), and jot down lots of ideas in a brief span of time. Also, draft webs of related questions.

For example, when it comes to a piece of writing, you might ask, What am I trying to say? To whom am I trying to say it? What do I want readers to leave with or be ready to do after reading this?

Maybe you’ll use all the questions, and maybe you won’t. But creating such webs usually points to a deeper and more powerful direction for inquiry.

7. Am I looking for questions in all
the wrong places?

By committing to essential questions as a framing approach, you’re planning for inquiry and argument as a priority outcome. Essential questions aren’t a teaching move. Rather, they’re a design move intended to make it more likely that the work and talk get beyond low-level coverage. So looking only at the content you wish students to acquire is not the optimal way to come up with good questions.

To aim for understanding is to aim for three kinds of learning: acquisition, meaning making, and transfer.

Given the content, then, what theories
should learners build and test? What
problems and texts will prompt them
to do so? What attempts at application
will raise all the right arguments and
require further generalizations?

For example, in a unit on mean, median, and mode, just learning to manipulate those three concepts won’t develop understanding. The interesting and arguable aspects of those concepts lie in how to best use them—and avoid misusing them!—in making sense of real data. So this draft question heads in the wrong direction: When do we use mean, median, and mode Rather, focus on the significance and applicability of the ideas:

What’s the fairest way to calculate grades? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each measure of tendency?

When are measures of central tendency most abused, and how can we defend against such abuses?

Tip: Build into your lessons meaning-making and application challenges—for example, a Socratic seminar, formal debate, or problem-based learning project. By committing to using at least one such interactive approach, you’ll more likely come up with an arguable and intriguing question for framing the unit.

The Bottom Line

The fact is, you need to develop the habit of always critiquing the essential questions you draft. High-level inquiries and questioning yield some of the greatest gains possible on conventional tests of achievement, as well as better student engagement.

Getting the questions right takes discipline, skill, and artfulness. But it’s well worth the effort to ensure that students tackle inquiries that are important, intriguing, and revealing. EL

References

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school (Expanded ed.). Washington DC: National Academies Press.

Brown, A. S., & Palincsar, A. L. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1( 2), 117–175.

Mc Tighe, J., & Wiggins, G. (2013). Essential questions: Opening doors to student understanding. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Wiggins, G. (2015, April 20). On transfer
as the goal of literacy [blog post].
Retrieved from Granted, and . . .
at https://grantwiggins.wordpress
.com/2015/04/20/on-transfer-as-the-
goal-in-literacy-7th-in-a-series
Wiggins, G., & Mc Tighe, J. (2011). The
understanding by design guide to cre-
ating high-quality units. Alexandria, VA:
ASCD.

Copyright © 2015 Denise Wilbur
Grant Wiggins, an
influential educator,
author, and friend
to ASCD, died
suddenly before this article went
into production. Among his many
contributions to education was the
Understanding by Design (UbD)
curriculum model, cocreated with
Jay Mc Tighe. Wiggins authored
numerous Educational Leadership
articles and ASCD books. He was
president of Authentic Education,
a New Jersey–based education
training and consulting firm.

Particularly pertinent to this EL theme, Wiggins coined the term essential questions as it has come to be understood in education. He will be missed by friends throughout the education community.