style="font-size:15px;"> At this point, the evaluation is much deeper, causing the learner to develop a set of criteria based on personal judgments. We can, however, continue to remove specificity.
What makes a great leader?
This question still requires students to intensely evaluate and develop criteria, but it inspires much more inquiry as many more herding questions arise from it. What makes a great leader at school, or in a family, or on a sports team, or in an army, or in a spiritual sense? Are these characteristics the same, and what factors influence their importance? Although this question is excellent, we can even go one step further.
What is greatness?
This is a truly essential question. Notice that each previous question is a subset of this question; in other words, each question becomes less and less specific as it develops. In speaking of greatness in general, we could be considering great leaders, great humans, or great devotion to sacrifice or humility. Learners can run wild with this kind of question, allowing you to achieve engagement and then add specificity back in to herd them where you want to go. If you are teaching students about historical leaders, a subset of herding questions might be to ask about heads of state, of which a further subset might be prime ministers, and ultimately a particular individual. As herding questions become more specific, they drive the conversation closer to the original and often curriculum-related question. In other words, they work backward from the essential question of “What is greatness?”
I find that educators are often concerned with asking such a huge, open question because they can’t see how it relates back to the content they are teaching. By starting with a specific question, moving it up Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), and then removing specificity, it creates opportunities for you to ask a series of herding questions that act like breadcrumbs leading back to the beginning. If learning is an answer, then it is the essential question that begins the process.
Before I address some microshifts of practice, a final point I’d like to add is a simple tip that helps in the construction of essential questions. Consider the question words who, what, where, when, why, and how. Which of these might best assist in the formation of an essential question? If you reflect on the levels of Bloom's revised taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), who, what, where, and when are knowledge-based questions, typically found at the bottom levels of the taxonomy. (They are the lower-order-thinking skills.) How correlates with analysis, and why with evaluation, which are at the top. (They are higher-order-thinking skills.) In general, who, what, where, and when support the why and the how. The reason my example of “What is greatness?” works is because the consideration of greatness itself requires extensive evaluation and justification, whereas a question such as “What is the square root of four?” does not.
Microshifts of Practice: Essential and Herding Questions Create Engagement
There are a variety of approaches you can take in developing and using essential and herding questions to engage students in your classroom. In this section, I describe three methods: (1) explore the essential, (2) go beyond the curriculum, and (3) use Socratic seminars. Each section includes a specific activity you can use with students and reflective questions you can ask yourself about how your students responded.
Explore the Essential
The first step in being able to create essential questions is understanding what they are, and part of this comes from being able to recognize one when you see it. Often a question may seem essential, but on closer inspection, you will come to realize that it can be even broader and help students incorporate even more critical thinking and knowledge creation into their answers. By recalling the characteristics of essential questions I present in this chapter, along with the examples I provide, you can create an exercise whereby you and your learners both learn to spot essential questions on the fly and understand what makes them so.
Activity
Begin by discussing what essential questions are with your learners and challenge them to analyze and understand their structure and significance to meaningful learning—that is, independent thinking and learning skills that will stick with them and remain useful throughout their lives. Depending on your students’ grade level, you can ask your learners questions such as the following.
• “What do you believe makes a question essential?”
• “What makes them different from simple or closed questions?”
• “Where do we see such questions asked in the world outside school?”
• “When are essential questions important to ask?”
• “How would you go about building an essential question right now?”
• “What are some examples of essential questions that are famous and well known?”
• “Why are essential questions vital to success in so many areas of life?”
• “How does asking essential questions shape and affect our views, opinions, and ideas about things?”
One simple exercise you can use is to collect examples of both essential and non-essential questions and place them where the whole class can see them. Next, have learners indicate on a worksheet or by using voting cards which questions they believe are essential and which ones are not, and have them discuss their perceptions in groups.
You can take this activity even further by discussing with your students how they could transform nonessential questions into essential questions. Ask them what it takes to turn a simple question with an elementary answer into one that fosters meaningful discussion, exploration, and reflection. Ask them how they would transform the question in both word and intent.
Reflection
After you complete this activity with your students, take some time to reflect on and answer the following questions.
• What knowledge were your learners able to demonstrate about essential questions?
• How much better do they now understand an essential question’s structure and importance?
• In what ways and in what other kinds of activities could your students apply this new knowledge?
Go Beyond the Curriculum
In Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005) remind us that essential questions are “important questions that recur throughout all our lives” and that they are “broad in scope and timeless by nature” (p. 108). Such questions lead us to explore the deeper issues of life and what it means to have uniquely human experiences and interactions with the world around us and those we share it with. These issues may not necessarily align with your core curriculum, but there is value in having your students receive practice with how to explore them. This is the time for you to step outside the curriculum and encourage them to let their imaginations soar without fear of judgment. Ask your learners what’s on their minds, what their primary concerns are, and what they truly wonder about.
Activity
Have your learners think about, write, and revise a list of questions that concern the kinds of timeless topics that interest them and make them want to investigate. This is a way for you to connect them to their interests, their deepest musings about everything under the sun, and perhaps even to things beyond the sun. They need not restrict the questions they write
