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Essential Questions provide frameworks for collaborative team curriculum creation; yet, controversy around such questions arises because of several factors. This author suggests five paths to responsible, English-friendly use of Essential Questions.
Let me ask you,? interjected my colleague at a recent meeting, ?are Essential Questions truly so essential in English class? Our texts are rich with inherent arguments, controversy, insight, and beauty-I want my students to encounter it all! Honestly, now, doesn't inquiry actually limit us and our students??
Essential Questions (EQs) are familiar landmarks in the national teaching landscape, applied across varied disciplines and diverse classrooms. Over time our familiarity with their form has grown (see Figure 1). Yet, as raised by my colleague above, there seem to be some lingering questions about their presumed central location in middle school and high school English classrooms. It is clear that many English teachers have seen profound benefits to introducing inquiry into their classrooms, but as adoption of EQs has proceeded, frustrations, road-blocks, and uncertainties have appeared along the way. (Coincidentally, these issues often appear as essential questions, too.) Here are some questions I have heard:
* Are EQs too limiting for our students when they encounter text? Do they unduly limit
* student responsibility for initiating inquiry?
* appreciation of artistry in writing?
* the search for meaning to one angle in a work?
* transfer of skills in essay assessment (by favoring the unit-long question)?
* Do EQs unduly limit teachers' ability to innovate?
* Do they become staid and boring via repetition throughout a unit or semester?
These questions, uncovered in subsequent discussions and reflections with teachers, represent a practical analysis of theory in practice. They reveal the rough edges of implementation but are far from a reason to abandon their use. By considering the issues raised above in light of our desired discipline outcomes, a way forward appears for each. As a result, I propose five recommendations for fine-tuning our Essential Questions to remove some of the friction that English teachers uniquely feel upon integrating such questions into our discipline.
Content and Skills Interplay
The first recommendation is based on a recognition that English students find themselves at a convergence of two important competing forces: a skills focus (inspired most recently...