1. Essential Questions What Are Essential Questions?
How Do They Help Teachers?
How Do They Help Students?

2. What are Essential Questions?
Essential Questions guide a unit of study
These Questions:
Reflect conceptual priorities
Go to the heart of the discipline
Recur naturally
Raise important questions across content areas
Have no one obvious “right” answer
Are framed to provoke student interest

3. What is the difference between Essential and Unit Questions?
Essential Questions:
Are broad in scope
Provide bridges between disciplines and units of study
Usually have no right answer
Example: How does conflict produce change?
Unit Questions:
Are tied to a specific topic or unit of study
Support and continue the study of an Essential Question
Examples: How does stress on the environment impact evolution?
How were changes in economics a factor in the Civil War?
In the story, Charlotte’s Web, how do the animals’
different abilities help Wilbur survive and succeed?

4. Why Use Essential Questions?
To target higher-level thinking skills
To require comparison, synthesis, interpretation, evaluation, etc.
To ensure student projects are compelling and engaging
To require more than a simple restatement of facts
To focus on important topics
To connect learning to other disciplines and other topics of study
To ask questions that have been asked throughout human history
To address compelling questions that students ask

5. How Do Essential Questions Help Teachers?
They help teachers focus on important topics in their year-long curriculum and bring meaning across subject areas:
They raise important questions across content areas (Math, Science, Literature, History, etc.).
They center around major issues, problems, concerns, interests, or themes that also occur in other units.

6. How Do Essential Questions Help Students?
They help to engage students:
Essential Questions bring meaning and focus to the study of events and topics throughout a project or course, which otherwise may seem arbitrary or unrelated.
They help students compare, contrast, and make analogies.
Questions are relevant, compelling, interesting, and are written in age-appropriate, student language.

7. How Do Essential Questions Help Students?
They help to engage students:
They engage students’ imagination and connect the subject with their own experiences and ideas.
There is no one, obvious “right” answer, so students are challenged to explore many possibilities.
They encourage in-depth discussion and research, and set the stage for further questioning.

8. What is an Essential Question? …And what is not?
Essential Questions vs
“Simple,” Fact-based,
“One” Answer Questions
How does art reflect culture or change it?
What is renaissance art?
How does an organism succeed in its environment?
What is the life cycle of a frog?
How does conflict produce change?
What is the conflict in the story…?
Why do laws change?
How does a bill become law?
Essential Questions vs
“Simple,” Fact-based,
“One” Answer Questions
How does art reflect culture or change it?
What is renaissance art?
How does an organism succeed in its environment?
What is the life cycle of a frog?
How does conflict produce change?
What is the conflict in the story…?
Why do laws change?
How does a bill become law?
Is history a history of progress?
What are three inventions created by Ben Franklin?
Essential Questions vs
“Simple,” Fact-based,
“One” Answer Questions
How does art reflect culture or change it?
What is renaissance art?
How does an organism succeed in its environment?
What is the life cycle of a frog?
How does conflict produce change?
What is the conflict in the story…?
Essential Questions vs
“Simple,” Fact-based,
“One” Answer Questions
How does art reflect culture or change it?
What is renaissance art?
How does an organism succeed in its environment?
What is the life cycle of a frog?
Essential Questions vs
“Simple,” Fact-based,
“One” Answer Questions
How does art reflect culture or change it?
What is renaissance art?
Click here to see how a team of teachers
can use one Essential Question

9. How do Unit Questions Support Essential Questions?
&
Unit Questions
How can math help me understand the world around me?
What are fractals good for?
Why have stories always been important throughout history?
Can literature change a person’s life?
Why do we still read Shakespeare?
How does art reflect or change society?
How does impressionist art reflect life in the late 1800’s?
How does your own art reflect your life and culture?
What does it take to change the world?
How did the policies or actions of Abraham Lincoln affect America in the 1860’s?
How do the policies or actions of Abraham Lincoln affect your life today?

10. How are Essential and Unit Questions Related to Curriculum Frameworks?
4th Grade Standard (California)
Students will know that plate tectonics account for important features of Earth’s surface and major geologic events.
Sample objective
Students will demonstrate and explain how volcanoes and different types of mountains result from plate motions.
Overarching Concept
Change
Essential Question
How does the earth change?
Unit Question
How are mountains made?
Could a volcano erupt in my backyard?
Sometimes it’s easier to come up with the Unit Question first and then go to the Essential Question. You have to decide which process will work best for you.
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11. How are Essential and Unit Questions Related to Curriculum Frameworks?
10th Grade Standard (Oregon)
Students will understand how literature records, reflects, communicates, and influences human events. …Students will identify themes in literary works and provide support for interpretations from the text.
Sample objective
Students will identify a common theme in one of Shakespeare’s plays and in a contemporary work, comparing and contrasting the theme’s development.
Overarching Concept
Prevailing Themes in Literature
Human Nature
Essential Question
Why have stories always been important throughout human history?
Unit Question
Why do we still read Shakespeare?
Sometimes it’s easier to come up with the Unit Question first and then go to the Essential Question. You have to decide which process will work best for you.
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12. What Are Some Tips for Developing Essential Questions?
Just start…don’t worry about the mechanics and language. Focus on brainstorming.
Think about the questions your students ask each time you teach this unit, and focus on what they find most fascinating.
Determine what you want your students to remember from this Unit in five years.
You may want to write your question as a statement first, and then revise it into a question.
If needed, write the questions in adult language to capture the essential understandings, then rewrite in “kid” language.
Keep asking the question students ask: “So what?”

13. What Are Some Tips for Developing Essential Questions?
After your brainstorming, share your questions with several colleagues and gather other ideas for revising your questions.
Continue to revisit and improve questions throughout the creation of your Unit Portfolio.

14. How can Different Unit Questions Support a Single Essential Question?
Unit Questions asked in one course of study can explore different facets of an Essential Question.
Teams of teachers from different disciplines can use their own unique Unit Questions to support one common, unifying Essential Question.
Unit Questions
Essential Question
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15. How can Different Unit Questions Support a Single Essential Question?
Social Studies Unit Question:
How does war create change in the economy?
Language Arts Unit Questions:
In Lord of the Flies, how do the characters respond to conflict?
How does Lord of the Flies help us to understand our complex human nature?
Science Unit Question:
How do animals adapt to a changing environment?
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How does conflict product change?

16. How can Different Unit Questions Support a Single Essential Question?
Unit Questions targeting different age groups can support an over-arching Essential Question that is developed across grade levels.
For example, Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Massachusetts uses school-wide Essential Questions where coursework across all grade levels (7-12) focuses on one Essential Question:
What is community? [1995–96]
What is change? [1996–97]
What is balance? [1997–98]
Where are the patterns? [1998–99]
What's the limit? [1999–2000]
What really matters? [ ]
Where's the truth? [ ]
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