1. Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions
Based on: Understanding by Design McTighe & Wiggins, 2005

2. The Lancaster School District Approach
Enduring Understanding
Standard Across District
Unit
Teacher Developed
Essential Question 1
CCSS ELA
CA Content Standards
Essential Question 2
Essential Question 3
The Lancaster School District Approach
Based on the work of McTighe & Wiggens, 2013

3. “…education should strive to develop and deepen students' understanding of important ideas and processes so that they can transfer their learning within and outside school. Accordingly, we recommend that content (related goals) be unpacked to identify long-term transfer goals and desired understandings.”
McTighe & Wiggins, 2013

4. What is an Enduring Understanding?
Enduring Understandings are the specific insights, inferences, or conclusions about the important big ideas, residing at the heart of all disciplines, that we want students to learn. They are:
Timeless
Cut across topics
Abstractions, rather than facts
Not “teachable” in the conventional sense

5. What are Essential Questions?
are derived from Enduring Understandings.
help guide students through the process of inquiry.
prompt guided inference whereby the student must make, recognize, or verify a conclusion.
help students construct meaning out of abstract notions and ideas.
lead students to the Enduring Understanding.

6. Enduring Understanding vs. Essential Questions
Enduring Understandings
Essential Questions
Many factors, such as geography, climate, and natural resources impact the economy and lifestyle of the people living in a particular region.
Understanding the impact of the environment and its influence on humans allows us to adapt to our surroundings.
How does where you live influence how you live?
How does the movement of water through an environment affect humanity for the people living there?

7. What makes a question essential? From McTighe & Wiggins, 2013
Essential Questions
Not Essential Questions
How do the arts shape, as well as reflect, a culture?
What do effective problem solvers do when they get stuck?
Is there ever a “just” war?
What characteristics define a “true friend?”
What common artistic symbols were used by the Incas and the Mayans.
What steps did you follow to get your answer?
What key event sparked World War I?
Which person is a true friend to Maggie in the story?
Have participants read both columns and discuss what makes a questions essential vs. not essential

8. Two Types of Essential Questions
Overarching Essential Questions
Topical Essential Questions
How does perspective change how a story is told?
In what ways does art reflect, as well as shape, culture?
What various story elements do authors use to develop mood?
What makes up a system?
How did the Native Americans of southern California view the “settlement” of their land?
What does the architecture of ancient Athens reveal about the culture of that time?
How does J.D. Salinger create mood in his novel, Catcher in the Rye?
How do various body systems interact?
Have participants discuss when overarching vs. topical essential questions may be appropriate.

9. Is it an essential question?
Is it open-ended?
Is it thought-provoking?
Does it call for higher-order thinking, such as analysis, inference, evaluation, and/or prediction?
Does it point toward important, transferable ideas (i.e., The Enduring Understanding)?
Does it raise additional questions and spark further inquiry?
Does it require support and justification?
Does it recur over time?

10. Activity
Work in pairs.
Read each question and determine whether or not it is an essential question.
Rewrite non-essential questions to make them essential.
Hand-out DOK reference sheet

11. Why do we use Essential Questions?
Promote inquiry as a key goal of our instruction.
Increase the intellectual engagement of our units.
Organize standards within each unit.
Encourage and model metacognition for students.

12. How to use Essential Questions
Step 1: Introduce the Essential Question to the students.
Step 2: Use DOK questioning strategies to elicit varied responses from your students. Ask students to predict an answer to the question or to make a personal connection.
Step 3: Introduce and explore new perspectives as you teach your content (this is where the majority of your time is spent).
Step 4: Reach tentative closure by asking students to generalize their findings. Students revisit and affirm or revise their original predictions or connections.

13. The 1st Step in Unit Planning
Review your unit’s Enduring Understanding.
Examine the standards you should be teaching according to the YAAG.
Organize your standards into logical groups.
Write an Essential Question for each group of standards that connects the Enduring Understanding to the CCSS and content standards.