How essential are essential questions? Are they really necessary for a quality curriculum? Are these two previous questions essential questions?
I'm not sure if essential questions are truly necessary for a quality curriculum, but I have found that utilizing them within my own teaching practices have helped me focus my curriculum into a more cohesive body of work. Furthermore, thinking critically about essential questions and referring students to them throughout a unit of study is something I have found to help put the 'why' into the why are we learning/studying this for students. In this way, students can step back from what they are learning on a day-to-day basis and see the larger picture of a course or unit of study.
Generative questions, while similar in purpose to essential questions, also require focusing on a topic that is interesting to the teacher. I like this aspect of generative questions; finding something that I am passionate about is much easier to teach and spend time on than those topics of little interest to me. I also assume that this preference is picked up by my students and translated in some way to their engagement within the classroom.
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