For example, with my clients, I work the shifts through a continual action-research cycle. We assign a learning conversation facilitator to a group of teachers. These facilitators may be administrators, heads of faculties, learning coaches, or any other authority figure who makes sense in your organization. What is most important is a structured process with accountability.
The facilitator meets with each teacher to identify the following: Which shift will you undertake? How will you trial it with your learners? What key indicators of success are you looking for? By when will you accomplish these indicators? The final step before adjourning is to set the follow-up meeting based on the timeline the teachers have set for themselves.
Each teacher then works to implement the shift and collect evidence of success. At the follow-up meeting, teachers reflect on the evidence they collect based on the key indicators for success they identified in the initial meeting. After discussion, the facilitator works with the teacher group to determine the next steps, and the cycle repeats until both the teachers and the learning conversation facilitator agree to move to a different shift.
To help facilitate this kind of work, my organization developed a new application platform (Wabisabi, https://wabisabizen.com). If you opt to try it out, I recommend that you access the Professional Growth section, which documents this process. The valuable content in this section is a direct result of the effort and outcomes of transforming teaching practices using these shifts.
It doesn’t matter which shift you implement first, only that eventually you work through them all. By focusing on these shifts, you will transform education from explicit teaching to future-focused learning for your learners, one microshift at a time.
chapter 1
Essential and Herding Questions
The first shift I present in this book involves deeply engaging students with their learning. You can do this by forming an essential question that tasks them with examining a learning topic beyond the surface level. You can then use their initial, free-form responses to that question to form a series of herding questions—questions that help drive them toward the specific learning goal you have in mind. Let’s explore what makes a question essential by looking at the concept from a different angle and then how you can follow that with herding questions.
When presenting new learning, consider this: If this learning is the answer, what was the question? Often, educators present learning as the next thing students need to know or be able to do. As educators, we may understand the scope and sequence that makes the learning essential, but students may have no idea. I believe the presence of an essential question might actually be essential to learning.
I have found that deep questioning leads to exceptional thinking when answers prompt more questions and more in-depth inquiry. Key learning areas arise when students face a flurry of essential questions that drive them to investigate; the fruits of that investigation result in knowledge, understanding, and insight. Would biology exist had someone not asked, “What are the fundamental elements of living systems? What structures exist within, and what purpose do these structures serve?”
I find that learning usually springs from a need or from curiosity about a personal connection. Learning has a reason; it is an answer. Without a question, learning lacks both purpose and meaning and is lost. All learning should start with an essential question, and the relatively brief time it takes to discuss an essential question benefits learners in terms of engagement, context, and relevance. Getting students’ initial answers to an essential question also provides you with insight into what they think and already know. Furthermore, the essential question and the conversation around it reveal personal connections, which provides the opportunity to personalize learning, something we discuss in chapter 3 (page 35).
For example, perhaps the curriculum you want to address involves medicine and diseases. An essential question you might ask students is, “How best can we ensure everyone’s health?” In reply, students may talk about obesity, nutrition, or healthy eating. They may discuss exercise, safe streets, or bicycle helmets. It doesn’t matter which direction the conversation takes, as long as they all engage in dialogue and debate. Even though they are a long way from where you intended (medicine and diseases), you can use their ideas and the engagement you established to ask a series of herding questions such as, “If all that works, and you’re living a healthy lifestyle and wearing a bike helmet, what happens if you suddenly become ill? What happens if you get a disease? Do you know anyone who has ever had a terminal illness?”
This creates an entirely new line of conversation, and eventually, you can arrive at medicine and the eradication of diseases. In the process, however, you have identified several opportunities for planning your next unit and glimpsed ways to personalize learning by allowing students to approach the content through what was relevant to them. For example, learners may know the pain and trauma of having someone close to them with a terminal illness, and questions that are relevant to them based on this experience stimulate a drive in them to find answers.
Put simply, the essential question is what starts the debate; the herding questions are what you (the facilitator) use to fuel the debate and drive it faster and more furiously toward a particular line of questioning. You are like the sheepdog steering the sheep through a narrow gate. The first nip from the sheepdog is the essential question to get the sheep moving. The herding questions manage their direction. In this chapter, I establish what attributes make a question essential and then explore some microshifts of practice you can use to stir students’ engagement.
Characteristics of an Essential Question
A good essential question calls for higher-order thinking, such as analysis, inference, evaluation, and prediction. Recall alone cannot answer it, and it points toward important, transferable ideas within (and sometimes across) disciplines (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). I define an essential question as having the following characteristics.
• It has no obvious answer and is not answerable with a simple search.
• It goes beyond topic or skills (skills relevant to life beyond school and to students’ interests).
• It creates the opportunity to use herding questions through the hydra effect (cut off one head [question], and two more appear).
• It's timeless and naturally recurs throughout the ages (it is as relevant in Plato’s time as it is today).
• It requires critical and continual rethinking (the deeper into the inquiry, the less certain the answer).
• It inspires meaningful discussion, debate, and knowledge development.
• It engages learners through a personal connection.
An essential question leads learners to explore the background of an issue and choose from various plans, strategies, or possible courses of action to generate a complex, applicable solution. A truly essential question inspires a quest for knowledge and discovery, encourages and develops critical-thinking processes, and is all about possibilities rather than the definitive. From here, I will help guide your understanding of what makes a question essential and how you can evolve and develop a good essential question to use with your learners.
From Nonessential to Essential
Consider this question: Do rainstorms create moisture? Then, ask yourself the following questions: “Does this question inspire contemplation or any serious inquiry? Does it generate other questions and