Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions

1. Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions Phase 1 of the Understanding by Design Process: Identify Desired Results By Bryon Christianand Cristy Rohla

2. Enduring Understandings

3. Indicators that a targeted understanding is not specific enough: • If teachers cannot agree on exactly what is to be taught or emphasized in the unit. • If teachers cannot agree on what should be assessed. • If students and parents cannot tell from the unit description exactly what is to be learned and how success will be determined. • If students do not know what to focus on in their study or how to study it.

4. A few thoughts on Essential Questions from McTighe and Wiggins Practically speaking, educators must reframe content standards and outcome statements into rich questions, and then design assignments and assessments to explore big ideas and evoke thoughtful and supportable answers. In contrast, most current curricular frameworks and standards documents make the mistake of framing core content as fact like sentences rather than revealing them to be summary insights, derived from questions and inquiries.

5. Characteristics of Essential Questions • Have no one obvious right answer • Raise other important questions, often across subject-area boundaries • Address the philosophical or conceptual foundations of a discipline • Recur naturally • Are framed to provoke and sustain student interest

6. Types of Essential Questions: Overarching and Topical Two types of essential questions might frame a unit: overarching and topical. As the phrase implies, overarching questions transcend the particulars of a unit and point toward larger, transferable ideas. Topical questions are more specific. They lead to particular understandings related to the topics of this unit the inferences and generalizations teachers want students to uncover. Topical questions may not necessarily be easy to answer, but they are answerable using the facts and materials of the unit.

9. Identify Desired Results Worth Being Familiar With Important to know and do “Enduring” Understanding The blank background within the middle ring represents the field of possible content that might be examined during a unit or course. Since not all of this can reasonably be addressed, we move within the larger ring to identify knowledge that students should be familiar with. During the unit, what do we want students to hear, read, view, research, or otherwise encounter?

10. Identify Desired Results Worth Being Familiar With Important to know and do “Enduring” Understanding In the middle ring, we sharpen our choices by specifying important knowledge (facts, concepts, and principles) and skills (processes, strategies, and methods). We would say that student learning is incomplete if the unit concluded without mastery of these essentials.

11. Identify Desired Results Worth Being Familiar With Important to know and do “Enduring” Understanding The smallest ring requires finer-grain choices and a focus on intellectual priorities. Here we select the enduring understandings that will anchor the unit and establish a rationale for it. The term enduring refers to the big ideas, or the important understandings, that we want students to “get inside of” and retain after they’ve forgotten many of the details.