initial answers to an essential question also provides you with insight into what they think and already know. Furthermore, the essential question and the conversation around it reveal personal connections, which provides the opportunity to personalize learning, something we discuss in chapter 3 (page 35).
For example, perhaps the curriculum you want to address involves medicine and diseases. An essential question you might ask students is, “How best can we ensure everyone’s health?” In reply, students may talk about obesity, nutrition, or healthy eating. They may discuss exercise, safe streets, or bicycle helmets. It doesn’t matter which direction the conversation takes, as long as they all engage in dialogue and debate. Even though they are a long way from where you intended (medicine and diseases), you can use their ideas and the engagement you established to ask a series of herding questions such as, “If all that works, and you’re living a healthy lifestyle and wearing a bike helmet, what happens if you suddenly become ill? What happens if you get a disease? Do you know anyone who has ever had a terminal illness?”
This creates an entirely new line of conversation, and eventually, you can arrive at medicine and the eradication of diseases. In the process, however, you have identified several opportunities for planning your next unit and glimpsed ways to personalize learning by allowing students to approach the content through what was relevant to them. For example, learners may know the pain and trauma of having someone close to them with a terminal illness, and questions that are relevant to them based on this experience stimulate a drive in them to find answers.
Put simply, the essential question is what starts the debate; the herding questions are what you (the facilitator) use to fuel the debate and drive it faster and more furiously toward a particular line of questioning. You are like the sheepdog steering the sheep through a narrow gate. The first nip from the sheepdog is the essential question to get the sheep moving. The herding questions manage their direction. In this chapter, I establish what attributes make a question essential and then explore some microshifts of practice you can use to stir students’ engagement.
Characteristics of an Essential Question
A good essential question calls for higher-order thinking, such as analysis, inference, evaluation, and prediction. Recall alone cannot answer it, and it points toward important, transferable ideas within (and sometimes across) disciplines (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). I define an essential question as having the following characteristics.
• It has no obvious answer and is not answerable with a simple search.
• It goes beyond topic or skills (skills relevant to life beyond school and to students’ interests).
• It creates the opportunity to use herding questions through the hydra effect (cut off one head [question], and two more appear).
• It's timeless and naturally recurs throughout the ages (it is as relevant in Plato’s time as it is today).
• It requires critical and continual rethinking (the deeper into the inquiry, the less certain the answer).
• It inspires meaningful discussion, debate, and knowledge development.
• It engages learners through a personal connection.
An essential question leads learners to explore the background of an issue and choose from various plans, strategies, or possible courses of action to generate a complex, applicable solution. A truly essential question inspires a quest for knowledge and discovery, encourages and develops critical-thinking processes, and is all about possibilities rather than the definitive. From here, I will help guide your understanding of what makes a question essential and how you can evolve and develop a good essential question to use with your learners.
From Nonessential to Essential
Consider this question: Do rainstorms create moisture? Then, ask yourself the following questions: “Does this question inspire contemplation or any serious inquiry? Does it generate other questions and ideas or meaningful discussions? Does it motivate the learner to think about creating something to solve a problem or meet a challenge?”
Not really. It’s a relatively empty question. It is nonessential.
In class, educators often ask students questions like, “How do rainstorms create rain?” This question is a bit better. It calls for some investigation and a search for knowledge. The problem is that students can answer it very quickly with some light research and a one-paragraph answer or a diagram. They did learn something, but they didn’t have to actually discover or create anything.
A further evolution might be to ask, “How does the rain from rainstorms benefit ecosystems?” In students, this question gives rise to deeper thinking, broader questions, and more in-depth research. Through this process, learners discover how storms affect different systems, and this will lead them to other considerations. It’s a fine question, but does it inspire, engage, and push them to visualize? Is it as good as it could be? How can we take this even deeper into authentic inquiry and creativity and make it into a quest for engineering a solution to an intriguing problem?
What about asking, “How best could we thrive without the rain from rainstorms?” Now we’ve got something really essential that will inspire students to fully engage with their learning. It also leads naturally to forming herding questions to help drive student explorations where they need to go, such as, If rainfall suddenly stopped for all time, what would it mean to life on Earth, human and otherwise? Who and what would an absence of rain specifically affect? Think about ecosystems, agriculture and food production, business, and the beauty of nature itself; how would all these things change?
Imagine the ingenious and creative solutions to this problem your students might come up with!
Development of an Essential Question
Although the previous example can help you better understand what an essential question is and looks like, and how to refine an existing question to be one, it doesn’t demonstrate how you might create one in the first place. Over the years of developing essential questions with teachers, I have facilitated conversations about essential questions on a whiteboard, crossing out parts of the sentence and rewriting them underneath. The usual frustrated response I hear from teachers is that it looks so obvious when I do it. This led me to consider what the simplest method is to consistently develop a quality essential question and herding questions. While I was poring over photos of various whiteboards from different facilitation sessions, I realized I have a very particular and unconscious two-step approach in which I consider the questions, (1) How do I move the question as high up Bloom’s revised taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) as possible? and (2) How do I remove specificity? It’s simplest to illustrate with an example, so consider the following question.
Who was Tony Abbott?
This is not a great question for all the reasons we established in the previous section. So, let’s simply get on with the first step of moving it up Bloom’s taxonomy as high as possible. Let’s revise.
Was Tony Abbott or Gough Whitlam the better prime minister?
This question now requires evaluation in the form of comparing and contrasting, which puts it near the top of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). It would, however, be simple to create a response and most likely would not engage learners nor inspire earnest debate. Next, let’s begin by removing the specificity of the two prime ministers.
