Essential+Questions

**Essential Questions (Q)**
Opened-ended questions designed to guide student inquiry and focus instruction for uncovering the important ideas of the content. Will guide student inquiry and focus instruction for uncovering the important ideas of the content. What provocative questions are worth pursuing to guide inquiry into these big ideas? • Have no simple “right” answer; they are meant to be argued. **(Not straightforward facts that end the matter)** • Are designed to provoke and sustain student inquiry, while focusing learning and final performances. **(So engaged until the final performance)** • Often address the conceptual or philosophical foundations of the discipline. **(Thinking like an expert)** • Raise other important questions. **(Leads students across other discipline)** • Naturally and appropriately recur. **(Response deepens with age, experience and understanding)** • Stimulates vital, ongoing rethinking of big ideas, assumptions and prior lessons. **(Forced us to ask deep questions about the nature and origin of our understandings)** __**Overarching Questions**__ - These essential questions point beyond the particulars of a unit to the larger, transferable Big Ideas and enduring understandings. __**Topical Questions**__ – Frame a unit of study. They guide the exploration of Big Ideas and process within particular subjects.