Essential Questions and Understandings: Frequently Asked Questions

By Kate Wolfe Maxlow

As many of our teachers in Hampton City Schools roll out Essential Questions and Understandings, we’ve had several great questions asked regarding specific implementation concerns.  We are therefore happy to present some of our Frequently Asked Questions and their answers.

1. What is the difference between a Learning Intention and an Understanding?

Glad you asked!  Confusing the Learning Intention and the Understanding is a common issue in classrooms, and I can see why.  It’s easy to think that by “Understanding,” we mean “What do you want students to understand?” That’s not quite the way it’s defined in Understanding by Design, however.

Instead, we are using the term “Understanding” to mean a big idea statement about the topic that points to why the topic is important.  In other words: if students take away no other key ideas from the learning, what are the 1-3 key ideas that you want them to know at the end?

Still confused? Let’s imagine that students are doing an Economics and Personal Finance Lesson on comparison shopping.

The Understanding that we want students to walk away with is: “Comparison shopping provides information to help consumers obtain the best quality for the best price.”

This is a big idea—a complete sentence and thought that helps students navigate their way through real life.

Meanwhile, the learning intention and success criteria could be:

Learning Intention:  The students will be able to describe the steps for making a savvy purchasing decisions. (1 day)

Sample Success Criteria: Students will use comparison shopping skills to compare two products to determine the best option for purchase.   

See the difference?  The Understanding is the big idea and the Learning Intention and Success Criteria are what students should DO with the big idea.

(Note: thanks to our amazing curriculum writers at Hampton City Schools for these example Understandings, Learning Intentions, and Success Criteria!)

2. Do you have to use Essential Questions and Understandings every day? If not, how often? How many should I use at one time?

Essential Questions and Understandings do NOT have to be addressed during every lesson.  Essential Questions and Understandings are written at the unit level, which means that a teacher should use them with students multiple times during a unit—but depending on your content, you may or may not use them every day.

A good rule of thumb is that, at a minimum, essential questions should be introduced at the beginning of the unit, revisited once or more throughout, and then reviewed again at the end of the unit.

Regarding how many Essential Questions and Understandings you use at one time, it will again depend on the topic and the questions.  For instance, you may have two questions that work really well together (such as, “What makes a great leader?” and “Who has power in conflict?”) that you can build a lesson around in tandem.  For others, though, especially when units contain more disparate topics, you will most likely want to introduce them separately.

3. When I use Essential Questions and Understandings with students, how long should I be spending on them?

You will want to consider the Essential Question and Understanding, how much background information students have with it, and how many times you’ve used it previously.  For instance, in an English classroom where the skills spiral around multiple times during the course of one year, and we have done inferencing in a previous unit in which we asked the Essential Question “How can I use what I know to figure out what I don’t know?” and now we are spiraling back to the same Essential Question, we may not need to spend quite the time on the Essential Question that we did the first time.

How long you spend on an Essential Question will depend on what you do with it.  At a minimum, it’s probably good to spend at least 5 minutes introducing the Essential Questions to students and having them respond to it in some fashion, whether it’s verbally, in writing, or another way.

4. Can you use Essential Questions and Understandings in the primary grades/with students working well below grade levels?

This is a question that I hear frequently, and the answer is an enthusiastic yes!  Of course, there are a couple of caveats:

1. Sometimes you will find that you have to change the language involved in certain Essential Questions; and
2. Understand that the answers students will provide will probably be very literal--but that’s okay!  Remember, the point of Essential Questions is that we can ask them over and over throughout our lives and our answers grow and change with our experiences.

Let’s look at an example using the Essential Question “How do you know your answer is correct?” This question is a great one that can be used in almost any discipline across multiple grade levels. For very young students or students working below grade level, you might need to change the verbiage slightly to something like, “How do you know you’re right?” And be ready to receive some answers that might be a bit off-topic, but the important thing is that you’re introducing the concept of metacognition, or thinking about how we think.

Want another example?  How about the tried and true Essential Question: “Is war ever justified?” If you’re using this question with a preschooler, kindergartener, or an older student working below grade level, chances are good that 1) they may not have a good grasp on the concept of “war,” and 2) they might not know what “justified” means. Therefore, you’re going to want to change it to fit their experiences.  You might ask instead, “Is it ever okay to fight with someone?” Keep in mind that their answers may vary, and you’re not really looking for correct/incorrect answers at this point, as much as you are introducing them to the idea of thinking about things on a slightly deeper level.

5. How do you craft Essential Questions/Understandings when the information in your content area just seems so concrete?

I always try to go back to: WHY do students need to know this material?  At some point, someone decided that it was an important piece of information or skill for students. Sometimes you have to move away from the trees and take a look at the forest, so to speak.

For instance, let’s say that you’re teaching a lesson on the cotton gin.  “Why was the cotton gin an important invention?” is not a strong example of an Essential Question.  Instead, maybe focus on the bigger topic: inventions.  A better, more thought-provoking Essential Question might therefore be:  “Who does technology help?  Who does technology hurt?” and the Understanding might be “Advances in technology can enrich and ease the lives of some while negatively impacting others.”

6. How do you use Essential Questions to assess mastery?

The answer to this question lies with the fact that Essential Questions are meant to help students think critically.  While they can also measure content knowledge, based upon the coherency of the arguments and the evidence cited by the student in supporting those arguments, it’s important to keep in mind that for purely assessing whether students have concrete knowledge or can apply basic skills, you might want to use multiple choice tests instead.

If you are going to use Essential Questions to assess mastery, you’ll probably want to do so as either a project or an essay in which students craft an answer to the Essential Question that they support with evidence from their learning.  And you’ll need a rubric to grade it.

But also keep in mind that the point of Essential Questions is that our answers can and should change as we acquire new information and experiences.  Therefore, with a true Essential Question, the work is never completely “done” and there is never a single, final correct answer.

As a for instance of how these can be used to assess mastery, I remember a final that I took in an undergrad World War II class.  There were several short answer questions, but only one essay that simply read: Should the United States have entered World War II when it did? (which is very much a more topical version of the Essential Question: When is war justified?)

Now, keep in mind that if you’re going to ask a question this big, you’ll want to prepare your students for it ahead of time (several of my classmates were upset because they had no idea they would have such a big question on the test, and had instead been drilling and killing for rote memorization). Let’s say you’re a history teacher and you want to use the “Should the United States have entered World War II when it did?” question on your assessment. I would strongly recommend first giving students the Essential Question “When is war justified?” question multiple times during the unit and modeling to them how to attack such a big question with a thesis and evidence.

7. Do Essential Questions and Understandings have to align with your Learning Intention and Success Criteria?

The short answer is...kind of (helpful, right?)

The reason it's not a "yes" or "no" is because Essential Questions and Understandings are usually based on the big ideas of an entire unit, whereas Learning Intentions and Success Criteria are based on more discrete knowledge and skills that students have to learn throughout the course of the unit.

So, for instance, a Health & Wellness Essential Question might be: “What does it mean to be considerate to others?” The Understanding would be: “It is important to exhibit consideration and cooperation with classmates and teachers in physical education class.”

Now, that's just one part of the unit and there might be multiple Learning Intentions and Success Criteria, some that focus on consideration and some that do not.

So, on a given day during the unit, you might have the following Learning Intention and Success Criteria:

Learning Intention:

• Student apply the skills of chasing, fleeing and dodging within various tag games.

Success Criteria:

• I can flee and dodge without colliding into another player.
• I can change directions without running into another player.
• I can find open space when being chased.

While there isn't necessarily a direct correlation, you can see that in order to meet Success Criteria, students DO have to be considerate to one another.  Therefore, the teacher might start with the Essential Question: What does it mean to be considerate?, and give students a chance to answer. The teacher might then introduce the Learning Intention and then ask, "Okay, so what does it mean to be considerate while playing tag?"  Students could then give more specific answers before the teacher reveals the Success Criteria for the day (which will most likely be very similar to the answers that the students gave).

Essential Questions and Understandings don't have to be addressed every day and during each lesson, as long as they are visited multiple times through the unit.

What other questions do you have?  Drop me an email using the contact information below!

Kate Maxlow is the Professional Learning Coordinator for Hampton City Schools, Virginia. She can be reached at kmaxlow@hampton.k12.va.us.