Enduring Understanding and Essential Questions in Inquiry Instruction

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Enduring Understanding and Essential Questions in
Inquiry Instruction

• Gretchen Lee- MRH 4th/5th
• g.lee_at_mrhsd.k12.mo.us

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What are we going to do today?

• Review characteristics of Inquiry instruction.
• Discuss how EUs and EQs frame the way we
  plan/will plan learning activities?
• Review process and considerations when generating
  meaningful EUs and EQs.
• Work time
• Discuss/Share our Enduring Understandings and
  Essential Questions and how theyll contribute to
  powerful Inquiry instruction.
• Discuss how students will interact with the EUs
  and EQs.

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The EU and EQ for today

• How do EUs and EQs frame and influence what and
  how you teach?
• EUs and EQs influence the quality and
  meaningfulness of the content you teach.

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CR (Culturally Relevant) Protocols I use w/ EUs
EQs

• Numbered Heads Together
• Tea Party
• Musical Shares
• Shout Out

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Inquiry Characteristics

• Based on involvement
• Involvement is essential to understanding
• Question based
• Focused on learning the content for the purpose
  of using it (balance btw school learning and
  life-long learning)
• Spontaneous, Collaborative, Fun, and Memorable
• Understanding are contextualized in experiences-
  Remember that time when

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EUs and EQs Premises

• Begin with the end in mind.
• Teachers are designers- we are the experts of
  what our students need to know.
• Design what you are going to teach (curriculum)-
  based on state standards AND what you know is
  important.
• Design how you are going to teach (pedagogy).
• What we teach- is primarily informed by national,
  state, district standards that dictate what
  students should know and be able to do.
• Challenges us to be more thoughtful deliberate
  about what we teach and how we teach. What kind
  of thinkers and people we are contributing to?

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EUs and EQs

• Stage 1- Identify desired results
• This step is about clarifying priorities to make
  sure that content is worthy of
• understanding.
• What curriculum expectations do we need
• to meet? (GLEs)
• What should they know and be able to do (filter
  GLEs b/c some are facts, knowledge, and others
  big concepts)
• What ENDURING understandings do we want
• them to come away with?
• What life-long questions are worth pondering?

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Filtering the standards

• For any subject taught in primary school,
• we might ask is it worth an adults
• knowing, and whether having known it as
• a child makes a person a better adult. A
• negative or ambiguous answer means the
• material is cluttering up the curriculum.
• (Wiggins McTighe,66)

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Why understandings have to be meaningful

• Learning that does not penetrate to the core of
  what is vital about an idea yields abstract,
  alien, and uninteresting lessons. (Wiggins
  McTighe, 68)
• Understandings are intended to be empowering-
  personally and intellectually
• Thats why we have to constantly be thinkingto
  what end?

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Understandings

• Understanding is not yes or no but a matter
  of degrees
• Doing something correctly isnt evidence of
  understanding, by itself. To understand is to
  have done it in the right way, often reflected in
  being able to explain why a particular skill,
  approach, or body of knowledge is or is not
  appropriate in a particular situation. (Wiggins
  McTighe , 39)
• Understanding is about transfer being able to use
  what we have learned in new and sometimes
  confusing settings. (Wiggins McTighe, 40)
• Dewey said, understanding must be comprehended
  and knowledge apprehended (Wiggins McTighe,
  58)

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Something to consider

• 6 facets of understandings
• Some units lend themselves more to certain
  understandings- depending on the big ideas youre
  trying to develop through the class.
• Wiggins McTighe , pg. 120- Figure 5.3

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6 Facets of Understandings

• Explanation- What, Why and How
• Interpretation- Insights, text to life,
  contextualized, stories
• Application- I have a connection. Real world
  problems
• Perspective- What does it look like from another
  point of view. Involves weighing diff. plausible
  explanations, debates
• Empathy- Respect for people different from
  themselves. Causes them to be open-minded,
  primary sources, music, poetry, experiential
• Self-Knowledge- develop self-consciousness,
  knowing ones own ignorance and patterns of
  thought.
• Also good for assessment. I use this for
  essay/short answer tests.

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Writing Enduring Understandings

• 1. Look at your standards
• Group large amounts of content, especially
  discrete facts, knowledge and basic skills into
  big ideas (questions/understandings) and core
  tasks (performance tasks).
• 3. Make deliberate choices and set explicit
  priorities for what you can do in the unit well.
• - What is most important?
• How do the pieces connect?
• What should I pay attention to?
• What are the few bottom-line priorities?
• 4. From the big ideas that emerge form the
  content into statements thatll help students
  organize and make sense of the information
  theyll be taught and their world.

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Essential Questions- Characteristics

• Good questions are one that pose dilemmas,
  subvert obvious truths or force incongruities
  upon our attention. (Wiggins McTighe,107)
• They are questions that recur throughout all our
  lives. (Wiggins McTighe,108)
• The best questions push us to the heart of things!

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Checklist for Essentialness

1. Cause genuine and relevant inquiry into big ideas
   and core content.
2. Provoke deep thought, lively discussion,
   sustained inquiry, and new understandings as well
   as more questions.
3. Require students to consider alternatives, weigh
   evidence, support their ideas, and justify their
   answers.
4. Stimulate vital, ongoing rethinking of big ideas,
   assumptions, prior lessons.
5. Spark meaningful connections with prior learning
   and personal experiences.
6. Naturally recur, creating opportunities for
   transfer to other situations and subjects.

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Remember

• No question is inherently essential (or trivial,
  complex or important) (Wiggins McTighe,110)
• Depends on the purpose, audience, and impact.
• What do you intend the students to do with the
  question? How do you intend for them to think?

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Open vs. Guiding

• This spells out your intent
• Open questions- No definitive answer is expected,
  challenges students thinking
• Guiding questions- moves students towards a
  deeper understanding of a big idea, posed as a
  means of uncovering desired understandings

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Topical vs. Overarching

• Now that you have your intentYou want a mix
  between overarching and topical.
• Overarching
• Limitation Only overarching is too vague- drift
  into aimless discussion- wont link to content
• Benefit challenges thinking connects to the
  world
• Topical
• Limitation Only topical doesnt facilitate
  transfer.
• Benefit Necessary for focusing on desired unit
  priorities.

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Essential Question Chart- Wiggins McTighe, 116
Intent Overarching Topical
Open - To what extent is US history a history of progress? What is progress? - What is a true friend? - How might Congress have better protected minority rights in the 1950s and 1960s? - Should Frog have lied to Toad?
Guiding - How much progress in civil rights has the US made since the founding of the country? - What are the signs of a fair weather friend? - What were the defining moments of the civil rights movement? - In what ways was Frog acting like a friend in the story?
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Writing Essential Questions

• 1. Begin with Enduring Understandings
• - you can also derive essential questions from
  national and state standards
• - Jeopardy format- given the content youll
  teach (imagine assessments and activities)-
  whats the question youll answer.
• 2. Generate a list of questions- put them in kid
  language
• 3. Discuss what makes them essential
• - what should they be thinking about
• - why should they think those things and in
  that way
• 4. Consider the balance between topical and
  broad questions.

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Stage One and Pedagogy

• Stage One and Pedagogy Interaction-- What you
  believe and what you believe is important for
  students to learn (stage 1) informs what and how
  you teach.
• How we design learning activities to meet
  curricular goals- refers to our pedagogy. This
  concerns itself with questions around, What kind
  of thinkers/ people/ citizens are we producing?
  (The combination of what you teach and how you
  teach is aiding the development of certain
  identities among your students!)
• Scholars Giroux and Simon on critical pedagogy
  When one practices pedagogy, one acts with the
  intent of creating experiences that will organize
  and disorganize a variety of understandings of
  our nation and social world in particular
  waysPedagogy is a concept which draws attention
  to the processes through which knowledge is
  produced. (Laddson-Billings, 14)

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Resources

• Wiggins, Grant and Jay McTighe. Understanding by
  Design, Expanded 2nd Edition. 2005.
• Laddson-Billings, Gloria. The Dreamkeepers
  Successful Teachers of African American Children.
  1994.
• http//www.culturallyresponsive.org/