Chapter 5: Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding

After reading chapter 5, it seems that essential questions are the backbone of a unit. Teachers should base their units on their questions because it helps elicit students to see interesting or alternative views of a topic. It supports students uncovering content, not just learning facts and memorizing information. They need to lead to deeper understanding and provoke students to ask more questions. Essential questions should cover more than just content and/or topic. They need to be able to be overarching the whole subject in order to provide students with the opportunity to ask more questions or more deeply understand the topic.

This is an important chapter to read because it holds a lot of information about forming the back bone to your lessons. Essential questions help teachers be able to structure their units and lessons to focus on teaching students how to show their understanding. Without using essential questions, lessons may not capture students’ interest or they may not be focused enough to keep students thinking about the topic.

After reflecting on my practice, I have realized that I do not use essential questions properly. I normally just take the big question that the curriculum provides and use that to introduce the lesson. I haven’t been using them to provoke deeper thinking in my students. I normally just use it as an attention grabber and by the end of the lesson my students have lost interest in my lesson. I do however ask good topic questions that give my students opportunities to answer with more than one answer. These questions normally have students support their answers with evidence. The next unit I plan, I am going to try and focus more on the essential questions I use and move away from the curriculum based big questions.