Essential Questions
As I work with faculty on their learning objectives, I have found that blending in questions with the objectives allows faculty to gain a greater conception of their course design and flow of the curriculum. Essential Questions provides excellent framing for the development of the course questions and provides detailed discussion as to their usage for those who might not want to incorporate their exact prescription. When crafting questions, consider what makes a question worth chasing.
If the content you are expected to teach represents "answers," then what questions were being asked by the people who came up with those answers? This conceptual move offers a useful strategy both for seeing a link between content standards and important questions and for coming up with ways of engaging students in the very kind of thinking that is required to truly understand the content. In short, expert knowledge is the result of inquiry, argument, and difference of opinion; the best questions point to hard-won big ideas that we want learning to come to understand. The questions thus serve as doorways or lenses through which learners can better see the key concepts, themes, theories, issues, and problems that reside within the content.