Stage 2-Generating Essential Questions &
Determining Issue, Topic, or Theme

This is where we'll deviate slightly from the Alliance Team. At this point in the process you will want to look carefully at your standards and begin to identify Essential Questions that arise from these standards.

Not sure about Essential Questions? Try visiting the following sites:

• Asking the Essential Question-Internet Innovations
  http://www.biopoint.com/ibr/askquestion.html
• The Question is the Answer-Jamie McKenzie
  http://fno.org/oct97/question.html
• Transforming Standards to Understandings
  http://magnet.sandi.net/workshops/informationquest/essential.html

According to McTighe and Wiggins (Understanding by Design) an essential understanding "represents a big idea having enduring value beyond the classroom." These understandings help you organize what you want your students to remember once they leave your classroom.

So, with that in mind, essential questions are the questions that will guide your students as they examine and learn. These are not simple recall questions. These are questions that can't be answered immediately or with a yes or no answer. They will require your students to problem solve and make decisions based on what they have learned.

Activity #5-Try this now: Look at your cluster of standards and generate some essential questions that get to the heart of what it is that you want your students to learn and remember about your unit.

Once you have your essential questions, you're ready to consider the topic of your unit. Since a unit demands in-depth study, the topic you choose must be able to support the necessary rigor. To determine your topic, do the following:

• Review concepts, content and principles in standards
• Brainstorm unit topics
• Decide on topic that will best get to the key concepts in the standards/benchmarks
• Research the topic to narrow the focus and define content
• Relate the topic to concepts and skills in the standards/benchmarks
• Determine broad understandings
• State the purpose as a sentence or as an essential question (preferably as a question)

To help you in this process, consider these questions:

• What topics are worth studying?
• What about the topic needs to be understood? (concepts, generalizations, principles)
• Is the topic broad enough to reach the benchmarks?
• Is the topic too broad or too complex?

It is critical that your unit topic line up with the standards and benchmarks that you identified. The most powerful learning is at the level of concepts, generalizations and principles. So the next step in this process is to determine the broad understandings for the unit.

Broad understandings are "timeless statements that reflect the big ideas that students will understand as a result of the unit."

next