What is an Essential Question?
This correlates to what teaching is but it is a bit more nuanced. This question is also critical for students to understand. So here goes!
Each course or lesson is designed around a series of essential questions. These questions look just like a question you may ask in your every day: What is that? How does this occur? Why did that happen that way?
These questions are also divided into types based on how what the answer requires you to do. A Depth of Knowledge Level 1 question will ask basic recall. These questions typically start with “what”, “when”, and “who”. A Level 1 question is “easy” in the same way we would talk about an “easy” run; It’s a relative term that refers to your level of effort. For some people, they have an “easier” time doing recall but Level 1 questions are not necessarily easy.
Level 2 questions require us to apply a skill. In history, we have historical thinking and reasoning skills, among others. I prefer these because it lends to the science of social science. We look for patterns when we analyze documents. We may be asked to compare, analyze, evaluate, or do a close read, among other skills.
You may notice one really important thing: while you are asked to apply your thinking, you aren’t being asked to apply your opinion. So if the question is “When did the Civil War start?”, we did not ask if the Civil War started. Our Level 2 will require us to analyze a series of documents that tell us how pivotal it was or how people were impacted. And we will use tools to determine the reliability of those documents, but when we are presented with reliable evidence, we don’t just dismiss it.
The key here is that for Level 2 and beyond, every teacher and classroom is different. Even a Level 1 question such as What happened during World War I, can differ from teacher to teacher. But from Level 2 and beyond, it really differs from place to place. What comes up in conversation, what documents are used, how we cut the timeline, it can all change. For example, in college, my professor for US History Before 1865 was an expert in Benjamin Franklin. We spent about a month talking about that guy. And yes, he was a significant part of what happened in the US before 1865, but his significance was definitely specific to a certain story for certain people. And I’ve never taken a course on US History that would do that same thing.
Levels 3 and 4 ask us stretch further. We may apply what we’ve taken from Levels 1 and 2 and apply it to a different time period, group of people, even a different course of study. We may design and create a new way to look at this event. We may consider what this says about similar thinking and events. This is “hard” insofar as the relative effort is harder. You’re pulling in skills, challenging your own thinking, and diving into sources.
In the beginning, I mentioned that understanding an essential question is critical for students. If each lesson is crafted around an essential question, you have to figure out if you left that day able to answer that question. If the essential question is, How does the mitochondria power a cell?, you have to be able to know why you are being asked this question: why is the focus on this part of the cell? How does this fit into the larger unit? What skills will I need to know to answer it? And again, while you may have taken a Biology course before and answered a similar question, you may not have used the same tools to answer it. Remember, my professor thought that the US before 1865 could be summed up in the life and times of one person. So I could sit there talking about the 3/5th Compromise all I want but that was not the set of tools that was given to me.
So what is an essential question? It is the core of a lesson that helps us to understand which skills we need to use to answer a question. At times this question may require a recall skill. At times it may require more strategic skills. And while we may see similar questions, everyone differs in what tools we may use to answer it.
