PBL Starter Guide: The Essential Question vs. the Driving Question

by Kate Wolfe Maxlow

The Essential Question and the Driving Question serve important, but very different, roles in Project-Based Learning.

Let's talk about Essential Questions. 

Essential Questions are big, open-ended questions that have no right or wrong answers. They're meant to be discussed again and again, in multiple contexts, and spur inquiry and justification. They can be asked in various grade levels and content areas, and they are immediately intriguing and spark debate. Essential Questions look like this:

1. How do we know what is true?
2. What does it mean to be free?
3. Who should lead?

Look at question #1. This question could asked in multiple content areas and grade levels. You could ask this of a 5 year old or a 95 year old, and you would get vastly different answers. If you ask it in a science class, you might use it to discuss the scientific method, theories, and hypotheses. If you use it The Great Gatsby, you'll relate to the reliability of a narrator. If you're in a history class, it's going to spark a question on primary sources.

You can see how these questions can be instantly engaging for students. Almost every student can provide a basic answer at first, and the depth of that answer will deepen as he or she continues to explore the question and look at it from new perspectives.

So what's a driving question?

A driving question is more specific than an Essential Question. It comes from the Essential Question, but provides a direction, or a reason, for exploring the Essential Question. In the context of PBL, it usually lets students know what it is that we're trying to better understand or solve.

Let's go back to that first Essential Question: How do we know what is true?

We'll imagine that we're exploring this question as a part of a Government/English/Library Media collaboration project. The Essential Question can be asked in each classroom and explored from multiple viewpoints, but it's the Driving Question that gives us the PBL.

In this case, the Driving Question might look like something: How can we create a resource to help people better identify "fake news?"

The trick to the Driving Question is that it is at once specific and yet open-ended. The resource created isn't named, so students have some options (teachers can also provide students with a list of potential options, but the emphasis should be more on understanding or solving the problem than on finding "the" correct answer). We could create a video, a website, a tool...sky's the limit.

Does this mean we leave it completely open-ended? Nope. The change here is that we move from expecting kids to create a specific "thing" to instead meeting certain expectations. We do this through the use of rubrics that are shared ahead of time. For instance, students might know that, among other things, however they answer the driving question needs to meet the following criteria:

• Easily used by anyone with a Grade 5 or higher reading level
• Provides an annotated list of links to reputable online sources
• Creates a strong list of "look fors" to identify "fake news"
• Provides an example of a recent "fake news" story, including how and why the story was spread

When we provide students with criteria like this, we give them space to think creatively and think big, while also ensuring that they are incorporating various learning objectives and meeting standards or expectations.

In Conclusion

By marrying the Essential Question with a strong Driving Question, we help students better explore real world scenarios, problems, and questions. We give them freedom to think outside the box and create real, important products and performances that can make a difference in their...and our...worlds.