Think your question is Essential? Read this first.

By Kate Wolfe Maxlow

I train curriculum writers and therefore read a lot of curriculum documents from every subject and grade level. I’ve done training on Essential Questions dozens of times at this point, and you would think that I would be sick of it, but I’m not.  That’s the thing about Essential Questions: you can always learn more about them. There’s always a new question to be discovered, mulled over, refined, and debated. In fact, my own understanding of Essential Questions has grown and evolved an incredible amount since I first started writing and training on them.

It turns out that understanding the concept of Essential Questions is easy, but just like good ol’ Benjamin Bloom tells us in his revised taxonomy, understanding general concepts is a lot easier than actually creating with them.

Sure enough, there are some common questions that often masquerade as Essential Questions. They’re questions that first-time writers often slap together and declare their work finished. I know this, because they’re how I wrote Essential Questions when I first started out.

These not-quite-essential questions are also the reason why I caution people not to simply Google Essential Questions. There are a lot of these out there, and while they each have a place, it’s alongside, rather than instead of, the actual Essential Question.

Not-Quite-Essential Question #1: The Multiple Correct Answers Test Question

Example: What are simple machines and some examples of them in everyday life?

True, the word “essential” has lots of meanings, and one of them could be that you have to know the information to pass a test.  But that’s not the purpose of Essential Questions in Wiggins & McTighe’s Understanding by Design. Test questions usually have right and wrong answers; essential questions should be open-ended and able to be explored over and over again.

The above question isn’t a bad question; in fact, having a basic understanding of this information will serve students well in life.  It’s therefore a question that teachers should be using with their students. But that doesn’t make it an Essential Question.

An Essential Question would get to the heart of why we care about simple machines at all. Why is it something worth studying? Essential Questions should motivate students to want to learn more, and the above question isn’t a particularly strong example of that.

Better question: How can we make our work easier?

Now this is a question that, if you ask even a third-grader, they’ll probably want to know the answer to. It immediately gets to the heart of why simple machines are important (heck, any machines). And, it’s debatable; “easier” for some is not “easier” for all.

Not-Quite-Essential Question #2: Guiding Questions

Example: Why are rules important?

If you’ve ever written an Essential Question, then I bet you, like me, at one point went for the easy formula of “Why is [insert topic] important?” or “Why should we study [insert topic]?”

Here’s the thing, though: neither of these questions are truly about debating the topic. Instead, the entire point of this question is that the teacher has presented the students with a foregone conclusion (e.g., “Rules are important”) and is simply asking students to justify that conclusion with various answers.

Once I point out to teachers that they’re not asking students to debate with this question, the second-generation question that I often see, is “Do we need rules?” And yes, this is debatable...kind of.  But again, what’s the intent of this question? The majority of students are going to think about it for a minute, realize all the ways that rules help us function in communities and determine that yep, we need them. Sure, some will disagree, but not many. Then most students will go right back to where we were with the first example of this question--justifying a mostly foregone conclusion.

Better question: What rules do we need?

Now, this is a truly debatable question. It leaves room for the students who want to say, “None at all!” but gives everyone room to debate. It requires deep thought and justification, and the intent really is to have students discuss and debate and justify, rather than to simply agree that rules are important.

Not-Quite-Essential Questions #3: The Process Question

Example: How do we summarize a passage?

Like many of the not-quite-essential questions, this is an important question that students should know how to answer.

It’s also not very open-ended or debatable. There are some pretty accepted methodologies for summarizing a passage, and most teachers are going to ask this question and then give students a concrete list of steps. Therefore, this question is more about learning a skill than it is about debating and thinking critically.

Better example: What is worth remembering?

This question again gets to the heart of why we summarize in the first place. We have a finite capacity for memory. We don’t need to recall every single detail and our brains actively work to dump whatever we deem irrelevant information.  When writing a summary, this is the question that students should be asking themselves. “What is worth remembering?” is also a question that you can use not only in English, but in many other subjects.

Not Quite Essential Question #4: The Hook Question

Example: Why is a square always a rectangle but a rectangle not always a square?

There’s a special place in my heart for great Hook questions. They’re fun and immediately engaging. But they’re also not necessarily essential to life, you know? I didn’t know the answer to the above question until I taught about squares and rectangles in fourth grade. Or maybe I did, sometime back in grade school, and then I promptly forgot.

Better question: How can the facts that we know help us figure out what we don’t know?

Okay, bear with me while I explain how the heck these two questions are related.

In my experience, mathematics is probably one of the hardest areas to write Essential Questions for, but I think that’s often because we’re so busy concentrating on getting the “right” answer that we lose focus of why we’re learning about the concepts in the first place. Also, I think that a lot of us grew up with mathematics instruction that was mostly about complicated algorithms rather than real-life applications. And when you get to upper level mathematics, sometimes there aren’t as many real-life applications and you trip into the realm of the theoretical, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of good reasons for learning it.

Therefore, I spend a lot of my time whenever I review a math curriculum Googling things like, “Why do we learn about polygons?” and reading articles like this. No one ever told me why there are 360 degrees in a circle, either, but luckily we live in an age where someone out there knows, and that person probably put it somewhere on the internet.

If you dig into the article linked into the previous paragraph, you start to realize that one of the reasons that we study polygons, their definitions, and how they’re related is because it is, in many ways, a time-saving measure.  For instance, if you have learned or proven something about a parallelogram (a four-sided figure in which the opposite sides are parallel), you have automatically learned and proven is about every type of parallelogram out there, including rectangles, rhombi, and squares. Think of all the time that saves!

So, next time you see an Essential Question or write one yourself, think critically: is it really Essential? Or is it one of those not-quite-essential questions?

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