Essential Questions

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Permalink Reply by John Sowash on January 24, 2009 at 1:34pm

I will be checking responses to this post because I would be interested in the same thing! I have been compiling a list of essential questions in Biology for my students. I haven't found any kind of comprehensive list of key ideas which I why I have been forced to create my own. My list is a work in progress and I am constantly revising and improving.

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Permalink Reply by Annemarie Stoeckel on January 24, 2009 at 2:29pm

Our state of NJ has been working with Grant Wiggins from Authentic Education, Hopewell, NJ, on a standards clarification project that addresses essential questions for the different subject areas. Here's the link to the project website which also includes a training video on essential questions. This may help - I'm using it for faculty pd too.

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Permalink Reply by Elise Mueller on January 25, 2009 at 9:50am

Could the PD be designed around staff developing the questions themselves? Might get more buy in this way and the transfer of learning from workshop to classroom might be more successful. Speaking from a teacher's perspective here.

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Permalink Reply by Gerry on January 25, 2009 at 10:07am

That's a great idea and I had thought of doing that but I wanted to make sure we had some ready available examples also. Thanks

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on January 25, 2009 at 11:38am

I don't know if this is what you want (maybe too narrow) but last spring we did a unit of study on the Titanic which started with the question "What to the primary sources tell us about this tragedy?" You can see our work here.

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