Essential Questions are those questions that ask you to make a decision or plan a course of action based on information that you have researched. They challenge you to think at the highest levels of Bloom's Taxonomy by requiring critical evaluation and reflection. Most Essential Questions are interdisciplinary in nature. They cross many subjects in the search for truth.

Criteria for "Essential Questions"

Essential questions:

a. go to the heart of a discipline. They can be found in the most historically important (and controversial) problems and topics in the sciences: What is adequate "proof" in each field of inquiry? Is our society more advanced than those of the past?

b. have no one obvious "right" answer: essential "answers" are not self-evidently true. Even if there are "truths" and essential theories in a discipline, the student comes to know that there are other plausible theses and hypotheses to be considered and sorted through along with the "sanctioned" views.

c. are higher-order, in Bloom's sense: they are always matters of analysis, synthesis, and evaluative judgment. The student is always asked to "go beyond" the information given.

d. recur throughout one's learning. The same important questions get asked and re-asked, if they are essential. Our answers to essential questions may never be adequate, but they should become increasingly sophisticated.

e. are framed to provoke and sustain student interest. Essential questions work best when the questions are edited to be thought-provoking to students, likely to generate interesting inquiries, and able to accommodate diverse interests and learning styles.

f. link to other essential questions. Good questions engender other good questions. It is therefore useful to think of a family of related questions as anchoring a course and a unit, and also to make clear to students that their questions that arise naturally are part of clarifying the essential questions.

The material above is excerpted from Understanding by Design: Curriculum and Assessment, by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe from The Center on Learning, Assessment, and School Structure, Pennington, New Jersey, 1997.