Workshop 5 Essential Questions

I first started considering essential questions this year when trying to realign my coursework with standards and benchmarks. I found that using the UBD essential question format was very helpful in the development of student critical thinking. I also can put these questions on student rubrics, and in self-assessment activities, so I can easily link our work in class on a day to day basis with the bigger picture. The Questioning Toolkit looks like a combination of these essential questions and the classic clustering diagram for teaching writing invention strategies. Most of the questions I use target larger problems or controversies in society. For example, in one class we are considering what it takes to be a good citizen? We will consider a number of different sources, plan seminars, and do research based off of this question. I think that problem-based essential questions are perfect for challenging critical thinking because students have to be involved in creation - they can't just spit back their teacher's words. By using questions, the teacher can prompt and scaffold for a good answer without giving one to directly memorize. I also think this kind of questioning is much more true to life than asking students to memorize facts. They may do well on a game show, but students need to be prepared for a future of using and applying facts, not just knowing them.

Though I might use a few of the groups of questions presented in the Questioning Toolkit as essential questions, but under the site's classification, probing questions and telling questions seem to be the most useful for technology in English. Probing questions could fit into research based technology, and telling questions can fit with multimedia, RSS feeds, and video. These questions can be helpful in showing students how to break a large project into steps.