What: Essential Questions (often called EQ) are deep, fundamental and often not easy-to-answer questions used to guide students’ learning. Essential Questions stimulate thought, provoke inquiry, and transform instructional inquiry as a whole. Essential Questions often begin with, “Why,” “How” or “To What Extent” but may sometimes begin with other question stems. Essential Questions may spur inquiry into abstract thought or may guide students to relate their learning to the real world.
Who: EQs are appropriate to use at every grade level in every content area.
Why: Research shows that EQs make lessons and units “more likely to yield focused and thoughtful learning and learners. The best EQs, handled well, make crystal-clear to students that passive learning is a no-no in the classroom; that thinking is required, not optional” (McTighe & Wiggins 2013).
When: Teachers often use the EQ to frame the learning at the beginning of a lesson or unit. EQs, however, can and should be embedded at all stages of a lesson and should guide students’ thinking and stimulate inquiry at the beginning, middle and end of a lesson.
How: Students should interact and respond to EQs in a variety of ways. Students can write about an EQ, discuss it with a group, partner, or with the whole class, use it to guide the focus of their reading, act it out, use it to guide their observations of a primary source document, create art or music in response to it, use it as a way to monitor how their thinking changes over time, and many other ways.
Where: Unit specific essential questions can be found in stage 1 of the ACPS Curriculum for every content area and grade level. Teachers may also create lesson specific EQs or use other questions to scaffold to a larger EQ.
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