I always thought I asked good questions. I even referred to my Bloom’s Taxonomy guide so that I was asking higher order thinking questions. But after reading Essential Questions by McTighe & Wiggins, I realized that my questions always led to an answer. A dead-end if you will. Or, in the case of evaluative questions, an answer that was unique to each student. And those times when I was able to generate a good discussion in my classroom, I honestly didn’t know what I did to foster such a discussion.
With all of this confusion in mind, Essential Question helped answer and guide my approach to asking questions. It also made me assess my relationship to the texts I teach and how I arrange my curriculum. Is it content I’m teaching or am I trying to get my students to be independent learners. As an English teacher I feel that question weighs heavily on our minds. On the one hand, if you teach freshmen and sophomores, they are usually focused on genre, reading comprehension, and more language arts topics. Which are important but usually lend themselves to inquiry and independent learning. But what about junior and senior level survey classes such as American and British literatures? Aren’t they more content based than inquiry? And that’s where I struck a sort-of compromise.
On the one hand I am teaching content. The Puritans for example. They developed a unique style of writing and the content and themes of their writing are unique and influenced later writers. But if I stop there, aren’t students going to forget about them when we move on to the next unit? And aren’t they asking the bigger question, Why are we learning this? And I have to be honest–I’ve asked myself the same question as the teacher. Is learning about the Puritan Plain Style really going to influence their lives? And the answer is no, it won’t. So I had to add a new dimension the units I teach in order to connect the content with the students’ lives and natural compunction for learning.
So I decided to tackle the bigger meanings that will, hopefully, help the students and myself to see the bigger picture and understand why it is we study what we learn. I came up with essential questions for each unit that will hopefully make the students question what they learn and therefore realize that content isn’t the only thing that we are learning. For the Puritans, for example, I asked the question, How can I be part of a community, yet be an individual at the same time?. Luckily, the textbook that I use goes one further. It has three questions that frame the entire class. So I’m going to be using a combination of essential questions for the class, essential questions for the unit, and essential questions for each text. We’ll see how it goes. I’m already thinking I’m asking too many questions, but then again, can you ever ask too many questions?