Keynote Slides
Key Criteria for Essential Questions
- cause genuine and relevant inquiry into the big ideas of the core content?
- spark meaningful connections with prior learning and personal experiences?
- provoke deep thought, lively discussion, and student-generated questions?
- require students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support their ideas, and justify their answers?
- stimulate vital on-going rethinking of big ideas, assumptions, prior lessons?
- naturally recur, creating opportunities for transfer to other situations?
Sample Sets
- Reading Essential Questions
- Writing Essential Questions
- Music and Visual Arts
- Social Studies Essential Questions
- Science Essential Questions
- Technology Education Essential Questions
- Physical Education/Health Essential Questions
- World Languages Essential Questions
Google Slides to Share Your EQ Work
Additional Resources on Essential Questions
- Interview with Grant Wiggins on Essential Questions
- Article by Grant Wiggins “How to Make Questions Essential”
Web Resources
What is an essential question? Blog post by Grant Wiggins: http://www.authenticeducation.org/ae_bigideas/article.lasso?artid=53
Videos and Examples of Essential Questions: http://www.essentialquestions.org/