Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding

This text continues the necessary discussion of designing curriculum for higher-order thinking by placing essential questions at the center of UbD. The benefit of this book is that while in their first work Understanding by Design they cover the issue of Essential Questions in one chapter, this time around the authors flesh out issues around using EQs in the classroom. Although some of the material in the first three chapters was already covered in the first book, additional charts, and a greater explanation on how teachers can make essential questions based on skills is much more useful. As a language teacher I definitely find these sections very useful. The book is also an answer to schools already applying UbD, and thus, it focuses a lot more on classroom processes than on theoretical foundations. As a result, it gives in-depth discussion as to how to keep alive the EQs throughout the school year, covers how many EQs per lesson are possible, and reinforces the idea that EQs should be at the center of the classroom. In addition to this, W&M make connections between EQs with older ideas, such as Socratic Questioning and The Paideia Proposal. The authors also make sure that this text is teacher-friendly, allowing for reasonable time to adapt new ways of thinking classroom planning as well as discussing potential problems that may arise in the classroom. A caveat is that this book is not about specific strategies or methodologies, or about curriculum philosophies albeit Socrates and Plato are briefly discussed with respect to questioning methods in the classroom. This is a text that is specifically designed as a follow up on how to design and use EQs within the Understanding by Design planning templates, and thus can be helpful for the curriculum maps.

This book should be on every educator's shelf. The ideas here are wonderful, practical, insightful, clearly presented and invaluable for increasing student engagement and critical thinking in any subject area. As a teacher of students with learning disabilities I teach five different subjects to a wide variety of learners. I instantly felt that the strategies in this book would be easily used with my learners, are easy to differentiate, and can be applied to every subject that I teach. I can't wait to start using them in my classroom!

Hi fellow seekers of insight, I think those amongst "us" who used to wonder: Why must we learn in the classroom style chosen by our teacher? ....may benefit the most from checking out Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding [Kindle Edition] Jay McTighe (Author), Grant Wiggins (Author) You don't have to be a teacher to gain from reading it. It is a short 119 pages, but uses most of them to explain how you can empower your own learning process. Yes, there are also suggestions of why the fact recall method of training doesn't promote transferable understanding, but that's not where the real value of the book lies. You will probably revisit it several times, and may find its suggestions useful for re-framing ideas. After accepting the premise, you may with time also unconsciously find yourself trying to identify provocative verbs that signal that you can re-frame the facts being viewed by you. That's been my experience. My attraction to the content in the book is that it gave me a road-map describing ..(albeit a little roughly).., how I could use language in the form of questions to encourage & discover new, bigger ideas ON MY OWN. Being able to do so is very helpful to CONFIDENCE building if you are taking courses where the pass mark is 75%. (e.g. Customs Broker type Exams) I like this quote " It is rarely the case that we come to understand a new and complex teaching or experience on first blush. That's why it is proper to say that meaning is made and understanding is earned over time." NOTE: I have recently purchased & have been reading this book, finding that it compliments Mr. Puryear's contribution to the ADD community. (i.e. Your Life Can Be Better: using strategies for Adult ADD/ADHD... Douglas A. Puryear MD (Author) Cheers, Simple Guy.

This book is so intelligently conceived and written. The logic for creating essential questions is flawless and flawlessly presented. Teachers need this. Students need teachers who use this, even more. The future will be much brighter with universal use of these principles. (The world, to thrive, needs thinkers - not just memorizers. Essential questions get the thinking wheels turning and turning and turning, with evermore satisfying results for teachers and students alike.)

This book is a great addition to any teacher when making different lesson plans for students. It allows you to trigger deeper understanding in questions that need to be asked to students and also understand how to teach students effectively with essential questions.

I used this text as part of a workshop I was giving on Understanding by Design. The participants found the content engaging, the examples useful and the writing approachable. I would encourage anyone who is interested in having this portion of the UBD framework explained more fully to consider buying this text. Dr. Brian Husby

Dare I say an essential resource for learning how to work with essential questions. Great descriptions, explanations, and lots of examples.

Don't let the title fool you....Jay McTighe also talks about other types of questions, even if only to compare/contrast them with Essential questions. The term, essential questions, is one of those education buzzwords that everybody uses but very few actually know anything about. This book will help the beginner and new-to UbD lesson planning.