Chapter 5: Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding

We have seen so far that our aim through UbD is to make our students reach a deep, meaningful and complete understanding of the learning objective we have so carefully designed. However, besides objectives, knowledge and understanding, we need something to connect all the elements together and at the same time we need something to make our students feel engaged in this lesson, topic or unit. One of the ways in which we can engage our students in learning a subject is through asking questions. But not any questions, we must think of meaningful questions. Essential questions serve as doorways to allow our students to make connections, to recall prior knowledge and own experiences. They have as ultimate goal to make our students ask more questions and to encourage our students to go beyond on the way to finding answers or to fully understanding the topic. Essential questions must lead to inquiry.

Furthermore, these questions need to be contextualized. Students must see and understand the relationship between their lives and the topic. They must find these questions genuine and relevant to them. However, once again, it is not an easy task. The book explains the four meanings of “essential” and also explains the differences between overarching, leading, guided and topical questions and the relevance of all of them.

Self-reflecting about this chapter, I realized that I do not use essential questions at all in my lessons. Probably I felt discouraged due to my students’ low level of English. Or I had not considered the importance of asking my students these types of questions. However, I must understand that this is really essential task if I want my students explain, interpret, apply, have perspective, show empathy and develop self-knowledge.