Essential Questions develop foundational understandings. They
provide the fundamental organizing principles that bound an
inquiry and guide the development of meaningful, authentic
tasks.
Essential questions have several key components:
- They
arise from people's attempts, throughout human history,
to learn more about the world(s) we live in. Essential
questions probably intrigued the ancients as much
as they puzzle people living today.
|
- Essential
questions are so compelling that people have raised
them in many different ways. Essential questions invite
perspective to be brought to bear in order to develop
deep understanding. For example, the question "What
is light?" has scientific, mathematical, aesthetic,
literary and spiritual dimensions.
|
- Attempts
to answer essential questions allow people to explore
the connection between their personal, individual,
unique experience of the world and its exterior, objective,
held-in-common dimensions. In exploring essential
questions together, people are able to find expression
for their own strongest gifts and interests at the
same time that they are able to establish a sense
of community with others.
|
- Essential
questions allow us to explore what knowledge is, how
it came to be, and how it has changed through human
history.
|
- An
essential question is always poised at the boundary
of the known and the unknown. While permitting fruitful
exploration of what others before us have learned
and discovered, attempts to answer an essential question
open up mysteries that successively reveal themselves
the more we come to "know".
|
- An
essential question reaches beyond itself. It is embedded
in ideals of freedom, strength and possibility that
permit people to come-to-know without becoming trapped
in constructs that are oppressive or no longer useful.
Essential questions arise from an implicit commitment
to human efficacy: to a belief that individuals can
make a difference, that knowledge can both be acquired
and changed.
|
- An
essential question engages the imagination in significant
ways. People can know only a limited amount about
the world through direct experience. We are most intrigued,
puzzled and enchanted by experience that comes to
us imaginatively. Without imagination, we could not
ask the questions that drive science forward. We would
have no art, no stories, no mathematics, no philosophy.
Moreover, it is questions that spark the imagination
that permit young and old to journey together into
unknown realms. Imagination knows no bounds, no restrictions;
nor do the questions we pose when we cultivate our
powers of imagination. An essential question that
arises from imaginative engagement is an important
way to bring teacher, student and subject matter together
in ways that enrich all three.
|
