Essential Question

          I've written about posting standards before.  This shot shows my Reading and Writing Standards for the first six weeks of the school year.  The standards in the purple pocket charts are the specific standards for the current unit.  The standards that form a border around the outside are the standards we are working on in every unit all year long.  It's not unusual for teachers to post standards.  I have them in the back of the room by my desk because I think it is more important to me than my students.  I want them most visible to remind me what to teach.  I also post standards when I post my students' work.
          This year, my principal asked if we would post our essential questions for each unit.  For those of you who do not know what essential questions are, they are part of a unit template espoused by the book "Understanding By Design".  A good essential question is a question that inspires curiosity in our students.  It is a question that encourages students to relate what they are learning in school to the larger world.  To be honest, I have always found essential questions to be a bit hokey and gimmicky.  Most sound quite forced.  I have been struggling for the past few weeks trying to think how I could honor my principal's request.
          I am sharing with my students the book "The Writer's Notebook" by Ralph Flectcher.  We are on the chapter he titled "Fierce Wonderings".  This chapter encourages students to write about what moves them- questions that don't have easy answers. That's when I realized that essential questions should help students wonder.  They should drive them to thinking.  That's where our "Wonder Wall" was born.

          Here it is in its first incarnation. I added the words "It's Essential" just so the adults who troop through my room know what they are looking at. :) But for my fifth graders, they are wonders.  There are four "wonders" here:  

• Who decides what the "highest law of the land" is?  (for a history unit on the Birth of a Nation)
• How can I dd more relevant details to my writing (for a Writing unit that includes how to write with a purpose and the English skill of writing with prepositional phrases)
• Can an object be part of more than one class or group?  (for a Math unit on geometry, specifically standards that relate to classifying polygons)
• How are picture book and novel narrative structures different?  (for a Reading unit based on the novel "Running Out of Time", our first novel study of the year) 

          And, yes, I am reading them to my students.  Not for every lesson certainly, but when they're becoming too task-oriented (instead of thinking/learning-oriented) I will gently bring them back with the purpose of the task they are doing.  When we are reviewing a concept, prior to linking it to the next, I will read the wonder and have them ponder it again.  This has worked particularly well with the history wonder, which I purposely designed to need a lot of unpacking:  Who is the who?  What is the highest law in the land?  Who did decide the highest law of the land?  What gave them the right? Did they decide correctly?