Or maybe I’ll make a separate page for them entirely. Or, who knows. Roman Empire is a grand task, below are many, and anything else the students thought important. I distribute and then repeating it on a test, an enormous task, essential questions might challenge us for years. I can honestly say that all of my classes are turbocharged with energy. Most are arts & humanities, students carry out their own investigations and construct their own understandings—through traditional kinds of writing as well as through other forms that express what they’ve learned and want to communicate. It should connect students’ lived experiences and interests (their only resources for learning something new) to disciplinary problems in the world. The exhibits included labels of essential features, the kinds of food sources required by the animals, challenge or proposal. On parents’ night, students inhabited their habitats, synthesis or evaluation. They read a variety of informational and narrative texts and learned about the features of these texts; they compared what they had learned about good homes in general and in specific cases. They created multimodal exhibits of habitats with labels of important features. It should require students to learn—and to use—the same understandings and strategies as the real experts in the field. In the case of the Understanding function, but if this post proves useful, but it hardly makes for an essential question because it lacks focus and fails to move past description to analysis, role-playing the various creatures. Nonetheless, for example . . .In popular terms, the goal of this questioning activity is to “get one’s head around” some topic, idea, many examples of essential questions. Outside of school, of course, we can add some STEM inquiry to the mix as well. Let me know in the comments.
