Educational Leadership - September 2015

Seven Ways to Hone Your Questions

Alas, such questions rarely emerge in the first draft. Here are some common first-draft questions: How do good readers use strategies to understand text?

What’s the value of chemistry? What were the three major causes of World War I? Why do earthquakes happen?

These questions fail to meet the suggested criteria. They’re all convergent, low-level questions designed to support content acquisition. They either point toward the one official “right” answer, or they elicit mere lists and thus no further inquiry.

If first drafts of essential questions are likely to be too fact-focused, how can we ensure that subsequent drafts better meet the criteria? Here are some editing tips, which, in the spirit of the topic, we’ve framed as questions.

1. How well does the draft question
meet the criteria?

Writers of essential questions need to
develop the discipline of pausing to
deliberately self-assess their question
against specific criteria. Look at the
first nonexample: How do good readers
use strategies to understand text? The
question is leading; it merely aims to
remind students of the answer. It asks
for recall, not inquiry.

A better question might be, Which strategy should I use when I don’t understand what I’m reading? By putting the question this way, the student must think about all possible moves and determine which to use in each “stuck” situation. The research on effective instruction in comprehension strategies shows that asking students to generalize their answers helps them become self-regulated learners because generalizations facilitate transfer (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Brown & Palincsar, 1984; Wiggins, 2015).

Tip: Create a simple checklist to use for either self- or peer-assessment of draft questions. The checklist should include the criteria listed above. You can also use the seven questions in this article to self-assess your draft. Finally, get in the habit of running draft ideas by others. Sometimes by just saying the draft question aloud, you’ll realize how to edit it.

2. If the question is too convergent, how can I phrase it to invite inquiry and argument? If the question is factual, what question on the same topic is worth arguing about?

Arguments involve unsettled issues of understanding or application—not settled knowledge and skill. We typically find debates not in the content itself but in discussions of its value, importance, or applicability. For example, there’s no argument about how to kick a soccer ball with the instep, but there are endless debates over when to shoot, pass, or dribble.

Here’s a draft question in English language arts: What is proper punctuation, and why is it important?

There’s little argument about the first half of the question, and the second half seems likely to limit, rather than expand, inquiry. Referring to the soccer example—and to debates on when to execute certain actions in the game— we can revise the punctuation question to read, When is proper punctuation mandatory, and when is it optional? We can easily prompt debate by looking at poems and social media messages that