Author(s): Wilhelm, Jefrey D.
Published: May/June 2014 in Knowledge Quest
URL to article
Research Focus Area: Strategies for using questioning and discussion techniques to deepen student understanding
Abstract:
I’m currently in my thirty-first year of teaching. What keeps me motivated is the engagement and joy that I experience when my students–whether middle–schooler undergraduates, or the practicing teachers with whom I work–deeply and creatively immerse themselves in the challenges of understanding and then apply what they are learning, producing important and usable meanings and actions instead of just consuming information provided from external sources.
Research Question(s):
How do essential questions promote creativity and deep learning?
Methods:
Literature Review
Key Findings:
Essential questions
- probe for deeper meaning and set the stage for further questioning and creative activity
- foster the development of critical-thinking skills and higher-order capabilities such as problem solving and understanding complex systems.
- are the principle component of designing inquiry-based learning that requires student contributions and creativity and applications
- typically requires and rewards one of the following thought processes:
- Student develops a plan or course of action
- Student makes a justified judgment or decision
- Encourage new knowledge building through the integration of discrete pieces of information obtained during the research process and the application of the students’ own thinking, insights, life experience, and creative connection of various ideas and themes
- create a problem orientation that leads to exciting learning conversations, to creative problem solving, and to the consolidation of major concepts, connections, vocabulary, strategies, and ideas that can then be used to extend further learning and to solve problems in students’ lives and out in the worldan essential question is question that
- guides inquiry as a problem to be solved.
- Gives inquiry a frame, a focus, and an immediate context of use.
- Is clear and concise.
- has no single “right” answer but does have justifiable answers.
- tells us as questioners–and our fellow learners/audience–what a project will address an essential question is NOT one that
- Can be answered through information retrieval–that is, by consulting pre-existing authoritative discourses
- Does not require creating data or constructing new understandings
- Begs the question; that is, assumes the answer to the question being asked
- Is leading (The teacher already knows the answer, and the students are playing “guess what the teacher already knows.”)
- Is too generic
- Is too narrow and specific
- Is not intriguing and compelling to kids
Implications:
How can we compose compelling essential questions?
- First, identify and examine the text, theme, or concept in the curriculum that must be addressed. Brainstorm questions that we or the students believe would compel and require them to think about the central issues without dictating the direction or outcome of their thinking.
- Second, use the six typical queries that newspaper articles address: especially Who? What? Why? and How? To these queries add the word “good,” “best,” “most,” “greatest,” or some other qualifier in front of the theme or concept.
- Third, select key words that elicit students’ focusing on impact, effect/affect, how, why, if, etc. Use words that make sense to us and, more importantly, to students
- Finally, apprentice students into the capacity of questioners, first to ask their own subquestions relating to an essential question and eventually to ask their own essential questions Essential questions should
- Matter to students now and in the future
- Connect to students’ current lives
- Be about quality and require students to make judgments
- Get at “the heart of the matter” (for the topic, text, discipline, etc.)
- Possess emotive force, intellectual bite, or edginess
- Be open-ended, debatable, possible to contend, arguable
- Be linked to data (Resources are available to use in pursuit of answers.)
- Be concise and clearly stated