Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions Based on Understanding

Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions Based on: Understanding by Design Mc. Tighe & Wiggins, 2005

The Lancaster School District Approach Essential Question 1 Teacher Developed Unit Enduring Understanding Standard Across District Essential Question 2 Teacher Developed Essential Question 3 Teacher Developed CCSS ELA CA Content Standards Based on the work of Mc. Tighe & Wiggens, 2013

“…education should strive to develop and deepen students' understanding of important ideas and processes so that they can transfer their learning within and outside school. Accordingly, we recommend that content (related goals) be unpacked to identify long-term transfer goals and desired understandings. ” Mc. Tighe & Wiggins, 2013

What is an Enduring Understanding? • Enduring Understandings are the specific insights, inferences, or conclusions about the important big ideas, residing at the heart of all disciplines, that we want students to learn. They are: o Timeless o Cut across topics o Abstractions, rather than facts o Not “teachable” in the conventional sense

What are Essential Questions? Essential Questions: • are derived from Enduring Understandings. • help guide students through the process of inquiry. • prompt guided inference whereby the student must make, recognize, or verify a conclusion. • help students construct meaning out of abstract notions and ideas. • lead students to the Enduring Understanding.

Enduring Understanding vs.

essential? From Mc. Tighe & Wiggins, 2013 Essential Questions Not Essential Questions • How do the arts shape, as well as reflect, a culture? • What common artistic symbols were used by the Incas and the Mayans. • What do effective problem solvers do when they get stuck? • What steps did you follow to get your answer? • Is there ever a “just” war? • What key event sparked World War I? • What characteristics define a “true friend? ” • Which person is a true friend to Maggie in the story?

Two Types of Essential Questions Overarching Essential Questions • How does perspective change how a story is told? • In what ways does art reflect, as well as shape, culture? Topical Essential Questions • How did the Native Americans of southern California view the “settlement” of their land? • What does the architecture of ancient Athens reveal about the culture of that time? • How does J. D. Salinger create • What various story elements do mood in his novel, Catcher in authors use to develop mood? the Rye? • What makes up a system? • How do various body systems interact?

Is it an essential question? 1. Is it open-ended? 2. Is it thought-provoking? 3. Does it call for higher-order thinking, such as analysis, inference, evaluation, and/or prediction? 4. Does it point toward important, transferable ideas (i. e. , The Enduring Understanding)? 5. Does it raise additional questions and spark further inquiry? 6. Does it require support and justification? 7. Does it recur over time?

Activity • Work in pairs. • Read each question and determine whether or not it is an essential question. • Rewrite non-essential questions to make them essential.

Why do we use Essential Questions? • Promote inquiry as a key goal of our instruction. • Increase the intellectual engagement of our units. • Organize standards within each unit. • Encourage and model metacognition for students.

How to use Essential Questions • Step 1: Introduce the Essential Question to the students. • Step 2: Use DOK questioning strategies to elicit varied responses from your students. Ask students to predict an answer to the question or to make a personal connection. • Step 3: Introduce and explore new perspectives as you teach your content (this is where the majority of your time is spent). • Step 4: Reach tentative closure by asking students to generalize their findings. Students revisit and affirm or revise their original predictions or connections.

The st 1 Step in Unit Planning 1. Review your unit’s Enduring Understanding. 2. Examine the standards you should be teaching according to the YAAG. 3. Organize your standards into logical groups. 4. Write an Essential Question for each group of standards that connects the Enduring Understanding to the CCSS and content standards.