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Curriculum-Framing Questions

Curriculum-Framing Questions. What Are Curriculum-Framing Questions? How Do They Help Teachers? How Do They Help Students?. What are Curriculum-Framing Questions?. Curriculum-Framing Questions guide a unit of study and include Essential and Unit Questions These Questions:

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Curriculum-Framing Questions

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  1. Curriculum-Framing Questions • What Are Curriculum-Framing Questions? • How Do They Help Teachers? • How Do They Help Students?

  2. What are Curriculum-Framing Questions? Curriculum-Framing Questions guide a unit of study and include Essential and Unit Questions These Questions: • Reflect conceptual priorities • Go to the heart of the discipline • Recur naturally • Raise important questions across content areas • Have no one obvious “right” answer • Are framed to provoke student interest

  3. Curriculum-Framing Questions • Guide a unit of study and include Essential, Unit, and Content Questions • Encourage students to use higher-order thinking skills

  4. CONTENT QUESTIONS • Fact-based • Concrete questions that have a narrow set of correct answers • Have specific “right” answers • Directly support content standards and learning objectives

  5. Examples • What are the elements of music? • What is the difference of eastern and western music? • Why is it cold in the winter when the sun is shining? • How are volcanoes made?

  6. Unit Questions • They are open-ended • Have no single, obvious “right” answer • Demonstrate how well students understand the core concepts • Are tied directly to a project and support investigation into the Essential Question

  7. Examples • How can we reconcile the differences of ideologies among a culturally diverse community? • How can music be used in promoting peace and camaraderie? • How can we enrich and promote the cultural heritage of our country?

  8. Essential Questions • Are broad in scope • Provide bridges between disciplines and units of study • Address big ideas and enduring concepts • Are framed to provoke student interest • Have no single, obvious “right” answer

  9. Examples • How can music change the world? • How does conflict produce change? • How can we all get along?

  10. Why Use Curriculum-Framing Questions? To target higher-level thinking skills • To require comparison, synthesis, interpretation, evaluation, etc. To ensure student projects are compelling and engaging • To require more than a simple restatement of facts To focus on important topics • To connect learning to other disciplines and other topics of study • To ask questions that have been asked throughout human history • To address compelling questions that students ask

  11. How Do Essential Questions Help Teachers? They help teachers focus on important topics in their year-long curriculum and bring meaning across subject areas: • They raise important questions across content areas (Math, Science, Literature, History, etc.). • They center around major issues, problems, concerns, interests, or themes that also occur in other units.

  12. How Do Essential Questions Help Students? They help to engage students: Essential Questions bring meaning and focus to the study of events and topics throughout a project or course, which otherwise may seem arbitrary or unrelated. • They help students compare, contrast, and make analogies. • Questions are relevant, compelling, interesting, and are written in age-appropriate, student language.

  13. What is an Essential Question? …And what is not? “Simple,” Fact-based, “One” Answer Questions What is renaissance art? What is the life cycle of a frog? What is the conflict in the story…? How does a bill become law? What are three inventions created by Ben Franklin? Essential Questions • How does art reflect culture or change it? • How does an organism succeed in its environment? • How does conflict produce change? • Why do laws change? • Is history a history of progress?

  14. What Are Some Tips for Developing Curriculum-Framing Questions? • Just start…don’t worry about the mechanics and language. Focus on brainstorming. • Think about the questions your students ask each time you teach this unit, and focus on what they find most fascinating. • Determine what you want your students to remember from this Unit in five years. • You may want to write your question as a statement first, and then revise it into a question. • If needed, write the questions in adult language to capture the essential understandings, then rewrite in “kid” language. • Be sure that all questions—even Unit Questions—have more than one obvious “right” answer—to target higher-level thinking • Keep asking the question students ask: “So what?”

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