Essential Questions Team Leaders’ Meeting

1. Essential QuestionsTeam Leaders’ Meeting January 26, 2011 Dommerich Elementary School

2. Bell-work • Take a moment at your table and discuss what you know about essential questions and guiding questions.

3. Common Board Configuration • Date: January 26, 2011 • Benchmark: 3.2.3 Professional learning strategies that increase student achievement. • Essential Question: How does questioning impact student achievement? • Today we are learning: the difference between essential questions and guiding questions and how they both impact student achievement. • We are learning this by doing: • Bell-work • Vocabulary: Essential Question, Guiding Question • Table Discussion: Essential vs. Guided • Summarizing Activity: Essential questions and guiding questions impact student achievement by…… • Homework: visit the PDS online essential questions module and discuss the next steps with your grade level team

4. What is an Essential Question? • It’s essential: important, vital, at the heart of the matter-the essence of the issue. • Grant Wiggins author of Understanding by Design points out the different connotations • Important questions that recur throughout one’s life • Key inquiries within a discipline • What is needed for learning core content

5. Purpose of Essential Questions • Spark curiosity and a sense of wonder (21st century skill: curiosity and imagination) • Require students to evaluate, synthesize, and analyze concepts (21st century skill: accessing and analyzing information) • Engage students in real life applied problem-solving (21st century skill: critical thinking/problem solving) • Provoke and sustain student interest (21st century skill: initiative and entrepreneurialism; curiosity and imagination)

6. An Essential Question… • Poses a student learning objective as an inquiry • Invites the student to search for an answer through critical thinking • Helps students see learning objectives in a meaningful context • Helps to engage students with the curriculum • Provides focus for the teacher on what is really important for the student

7. Essential Questions lead to . . . • Understanding • Focus • Purpose • Incentive • Engagement

8. Table Discussion • At your tables discuss and be ready to share out the similarities and differences between essential questions and guiding questions.

9. Essential Questions vs. Guiding Questions Essential Questions Guiding Questions • Over- arching question related to a unit • Broad transferable ideas • Promotes deep understanding • Can apply to various subjects or topics • Specific question that guides daily lesson • Focus on facts • Demand only recall • Specific to the subject area

10. Examples of Questions Essential Questions Guiding Questions • Do mathematical models conceal as much as they reveal? • Must a story have a moral? A beginning, middle, and end? Heroes, and villains? • How do languages influence peoples and their nationality? • How do wars shape alliance and contribute to national identities? • What is the area of the rectangle when its length is 7” and width is 3”? • What is a plot? • What are different languages spoken in America? • How are political parties different?

11. Most commonly asked question type is factual—seeking the right answer • “Is such a leading question bad? No. There are all sorts of good pedagogical reasons for using a question format to underscore knowledge or to call attention to a forgotten or overlooked idea. But those questions are not “essential” in the sense of signaling genuine, important and necessarily-ongoing inquiries. Teachers have to be careful not to conflate two ideas: “essential to me in my role as a teacher” and “essential to anyone as a thinking person and inquiring student for making meaning of facts in this subject.” Grant Wiggins

12. Essential Questions Move Students from Just Knowing to Truly Understanding

13. Criteria for Essential Questions • They fulfill learning outcomes • There could be two to five for each unit • Each should frame a distinct section of study for the unit • Design with a timeframe in mind

14. Are these essential questions? • How does a lack of natural resources affect a nation? • How do we use symbols in mathematics? • What are examples of scarcity in the Americas, Europe and Oceania? • Why do you need to recognize an odd, even, prime and composite number? • What are the symbols for equality and inequality? • Does the molecular motion change in each phase of matter?

15. Where do we find essential questions for the curriculum? • Social Studies—OCPS Task Analyses • Math—OCPS Order of Instruction • Science—OCPS Order of Instruction • All others—Good idea to work as a team to develop common essential questions for the curriculum areas you teach • BIG IDEA: Constructing essential questions is a way for school teams to get clarity on the meaning of each standard!

16. “Teaching the answers without first raising the questions takes most of the meaning out of learning.” Francis Slater, London School Of Education

17. Wrap Up • Summarizing Activity: Essential questions and guiding questions impact student achievement by...... • Homework: Visit the PDS online essential questions module and discuss the next steps with your leadership team.

18. Essential Questions • PDS online great module to reference as follow up • http://pdsonline.ocps.net • Log in using your user name and password • Search course: Essential Questions