F.L. Stanton Tigers
An Essential Question is Essential!
What is an Essential Question?
A question is essential when it:
1. causes genuine and relevant inquiry into the big ideas and core content;
2. provokes deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and new understanding as
well as more questoins;
3. requires students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support their ideas, and
justify their answers;
4. stimulates vital, on-going rethinking of big ideas, assumptions, and prior lessons;
5. sparks meaningful connections with prior learning and personal experiences;
6. naturally recurs, creating opportunities for transfer to other situations and subjects.
Examples of Essential Questions:
History and Social Studies
* Whose "story" is this?
* How can we know what really happened in the past?
* Why do people move?
Mathematics
* When and why should we estimate?
* Is there a pattern?
*How does what we measure influence how we measure?
Lanuage Arts
* What do good readers do, especially when they don't comprehend text?
* How does what I am reading influence how I should read it?
* Why am I writing? For whom?
Science
* What makes objects move the way they do?
* How can we best measure what we cannot directly see?
* How are structure and function related in living things?
Not Essential Questions:
* Who is Maggie's best friend in the story?
* What common artistic symbols were used by teh Incas and the Mayans?
* What steps did you follow to get your answer?
* What is a variable in scientific investigations?
* What key event sparked World War I?
* What are common Spanish colloquialisms?
Shannon O'Stricker
Instructional Coach
F.L. Stanton Elementary School
Email: sostricker@atlanta.k12.ga.us
Location: 1625 Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive
Phone: 404.802.7516