Some baking essentials
Saturday, July 12, 2008
The struggle with with essential question
Curriculum design should start with an essential question - what do I want the student to understand? The backwards design concept (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005) is different from the way I've written curriculum in the past. Our school wants us to write curriculum this summer using the backwards design model. My struggle is figuring out what are the essential questions in my content area. My current understanding is a good essential question isn't just a recap of the unit, but a question that goes beyond the subject matter - a "life question" that will be illuminated by studying the unit. One of my courses is Baking and Pastry. What are my essential questions? How is gluten managed in baked products? Is that an essential question - or does the question need to be more global? Another course is Fashion Design. Essential question possibility: How do fabric pieces fit together to make a garment? I don't think I'm really on the right track. I realize I need to come up with a series of essential questions for each course, and I feel a little ridiculous that I am struggling with how to phrase a good essential question. I hope for more clarity as I read further about Understanding By Design.
Some baking essentials
Some baking essentials
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Cross-stitch stars will be made into Christmas ornaments. Design is from an old Norwegian pattern.
4 comments:
This is the eldest shining star writing here. Nice blog. I don't understand pretty much anything you're writing though! Love ya!
I think the fact you are struggling with the essential question shows your understanding of what an essential question is. As you may remember, I was on that task force for the state to write the frameworks in UbD and we spent over a week writing what turned out to be five or so essential questions. And we still were not happy. So, a team of us with Grant himself guiding us, spending a week, and only came up with five semi-decent essential questions...
But, in my humble opinion, you are certainly on the right track. Think transferrable, meaningful, and applicable to any time they will try to utilize the skills.
This is a good point, exactly what is an essential question, can it only be bigger than life, a giant Yoda like observation? Looking at your questions, I am thinking maybe spell it out for the cooking illiterate. For example with the gluten question, I think to myself, why couldn't I use something else instead of gluten? Will it produce the same results? I think if you start with these type of questions, that you know the answer to, and I certainly do not, you might be able to frame the question in a way that sounds right to you. I am thinking in terms of literature for your second question. What elements or concepts do I need to be aware of in order to put a garment together properly? There are some many components, it's not just cut and sew. Maybe by asking what is the breakdown you get to a ideas that fill you in on the details. Or maybe those are do practical to be essential questions.
I also teach Family and Consumer Science and am currently wrestling with essential questions. I wa s online looking for help when I came across your blog!
Susan
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