Not really. It’s a relatively empty question. It is nonessential.
In class, educators often ask students questions like, “How do rainstorms create rain?” This question is a bit better. It calls for some investigation and a search for knowledge. The problem is that students can answer it very quickly with some light research and a one-paragraph answer or a diagram. They did learn something, but they didn’t have to actually discover or create anything.
A further evolution might be to ask, “How does the rain from rainstorms benefit ecosystems?” In students, this question gives rise to deeper thinking, broader questions, and more in-depth research. Through this process, learners discover how storms affect different systems, and this will lead them to other considerations. It’s a fine question, but does it inspire, engage, and push them to visualize? Is it as good as it could be? How can we take this even deeper into authentic inquiry and creativity and make it into a quest for engineering a solution to an intriguing problem?
What about asking, “How best could we thrive without the rain from rainstorms?” Now we’ve got something really essential that will inspire students to fully engage with their learning. It also leads naturally to forming herding questions to help drive student explorations where they need to go, such as, If rainfall suddenly stopped for all time, what would it mean to life on Earth, human and otherwise? Who and what would an absence of rain specifically affect? Think about ecosystems, agriculture and food production, business, and the beauty of nature itself; how would all these things change?
Imagine the ingenious and creative solutions to this problem your students might come up with!
Development of an Essential Question
Although the previous example can help you better understand what an essential question is and looks like, and how to refine an existing question to be one, it doesn’t demonstrate how you might create one in the first place. Over the years of developing essential questions with teachers, I have facilitated conversations about essential questions on a whiteboard, crossing out parts of the sentence and rewriting them underneath. The usual frustrated response I hear from teachers is that it looks so obvious when I do it. This led me to consider what the simplest method is to consistently develop a quality essential question and herding questions. While I was poring over photos of various whiteboards from different facilitation sessions, I realized I have a very particular and unconscious two-step approach in which I consider the questions, (1) How do I move the question as high up Bloom’s revised taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) as possible? and (2) How do I remove specificity? It’s simplest to illustrate with an example, so consider the following question.
Who was Tony Abbott?
This is not a great question for all the reasons we established in the previous section. So, let’s simply get on with the first step of moving it up Bloom’s taxonomy as high as possible. Let’s revise.
Was Tony Abbott or Gough Whitlam the better prime minister?
This question now requires evaluation in the form of comparing and contrasting, which puts it near the top of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). It would, however, be simple to create a response and most likely would not engage learners nor inspire earnest debate. Next, let’s begin by removing the specificity of the two prime ministers.
What makes a great prime minister?
At this point, the evaluation is much deeper, causing the learner to develop a set of criteria based on personal judgments. We can, however, continue to remove specificity.
What makes a great leader?
This question still requires students to intensely evaluate and develop criteria, but it inspires much more inquiry as many more herding questions arise from it. What makes a great leader at school, or in a family, or on a sports team, or in an army, or in a spiritual sense? Are these characteristics the same, and what factors influence their importance? Although this question is excellent, we can even go one step further.
What is greatness?
This is a truly essential question. Notice that each previous question is a subset of this question; in other words, each question becomes less and less specific as it develops. In speaking of greatness in general, we could be considering great leaders, great humans, or great devotion to sacrifice or humility. Learners can run wild with this kind of question, allowing you to achieve engagement and then add specificity back in to herd them where you want to go. If you are teaching students about historical leaders, a subset of herding questions might be to ask about heads of state, of which a further subset might be prime ministers, and ultimately a particular individual. As herding questions become more specific, they drive the conversation closer to the original and often curriculum-related question. In other words, they work backward from the essential question of “What is greatness?”
I find that educators are often concerned with asking such a huge, open question because they can’t see how it relates back to the content they are teaching. By starting with a specific question, moving it up Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), and then removing specificity, it creates opportunities for you to ask a series of herding questions that act like breadcrumbs leading back to the beginning. If learning is an answer, then it is the essential question that begins the process.
Before I address some microshifts of practice, a final point I’d like to add is a simple tip that helps in the construction of essential questions. Consider the question words who, what, where, when, why, and how. Which of these might best assist in the formation of an essential question? If you reflect on the levels of Bloom's revised taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), who, what, where, and when are knowledge-based questions, typically found at the bottom levels of the taxonomy. (They are the lower-order-thinking skills.) How correlates with analysis, and why with evaluation, which are at the top. (They are higher-order-thinking skills.) In general, who, what, where, and when support the why and the how. The reason my example of “What is greatness?” works is because the consideration of greatness itself requires extensive evaluation and justification, whereas a question such as “What is the square root of four?” does not.
Microshifts of Practice: Essential and Herding Questions Create Engagement
There are a variety of approaches you can take in developing and using essential and herding questions to engage students in your classroom. In this section, I describe three methods: (1) explore the essential, (2) go beyond the curriculum, and (3) use Socratic seminars. Each section includes a specific activity you can use with students and reflective questions you can ask yourself about how your students responded.
Explore the Essential
The first step in being able to create essential questions is understanding what they are, and part of this comes from being able to recognize one when you see it. Often a question may seem essential, but on closer inspection, you will come to realize that it can be even broader and help students incorporate even more critical thinking and knowledge creation into their answers. By recalling the characteristics of essential questions I present in this chapter, along with the examples I provide, you can create an exercise whereby you and your learners both learn to spot essential questions on the fly and understand what makes them so.
Activity
Begin by discussing what essential questions are with your learners and challenge them to analyze and understand their structure and significance to meaningful learning—that is, independent thinking and learning skills that will stick with them and remain useful throughout their lives. Depending on your students’ grade level, you can ask your learners questions such as the following.
• “What do you believe makes a question essential?”
• “What makes them different from simple or closed questions?”
• “Where do we see such questions asked in the world outside school?”