Essential Questions of Critical Social Studies

What are essential questions?

1. Essential questions adress the concepts and dilemmans that historians and social scientists puzzle over in their work.
2. Essential questions have more than one reasonable answer.
3. Essential questions connect the past to the present.

The technical definition of an essential question is an overarching question or statement used to guide performance-based curriculum development. Meaning, they are questions that recur throughout our lives, point to the core ideas of discipline, help students to engage in inquiry and make sense of complicated ideas, and lead students to transfer their understandings outside of the classroom context.

A Critical Historian’s Essential Questions

Our goal as teachers, in a social studies classroom, is to get students to ask the same type of critical questions historians do. THE essential questions in social studies include the following:

1. What is evidence?
2. Is this logical conclusion based on the evidence?
3. Whose perspective does this represent?
4. Whose voice is missing?
5. Where is the bias?
6. How would this narrative be different if told from a different perspective?
7. Can I trust this source?
8. What is the enduring legacy of this narrative?

When students pose these questions, they are thinking critically as historians do. Now, let’s discuss the effectiveness.

Are ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS appropriate for a social studies classroom?— YES!

Essential questions are appropriate for social studies classrooms because when they are asked and answered students are enabled to do a number of things. They are able to construct their own understanding of the past by deciding how to interpret historical data.They are able see history as a developing narrative, by challenging and examining their own beliefs. Finally, and, perhapd most importantly, and they better able to participation in civic society.

As Cheryl M. Jorgensen mentions, they are appropriate for social studies because they:

1. Involve thinking, not just answering.
2. They make students investigators.
3. They hook students into wanting to learn.
4. They offer a sense of adventure, are fun to explore and try to answer.
5. They require students to connect learning from several disciplines.
6. They challenge students to demonstrate that they understand the relationsip between what they are learning and larger world issues.
7. They build in personalized options for all students.

Essential Questioning in My Classroom

My inquiry unit topic — what would it take to provide equal access to quality education for all Milwaukee children — is a great way to engage students in essential questioning.

Not only is it something they would be interested in, but because there’s no one right answer. Students’ evidence and claims will depend on their personal experiences, and yet together, collectively, they could bring it all together to come up with difference ways to provide equal access to quality education.

Lesson Outline:

I. To introduce the lesson, students will be given a variety of resources to explore in groups of 4. These resources will contain a lot of information as to why all students do not have access to quality education, who is affected, and potential solutions to this problem. The resources will depend on grade level. Middle schoolers will be able to read articles and compare them. For example:

Our Goal is Equal Access to Quality Education

National wealth does not guarantee education equality, UNICEF report says

Education inequality is focus of documentary "Teach Us All"

In elementary grades, teachers would read to students and would do the “research” with them. Students would also discuss how their education differs from those in other states/countries by watching videos that address these issues.

II. Students will then evaluate these sources by asking themselves the following questions:

• What is the evidence?
• Where is the bias?
• Can I trust this source?
• How would this narrative be different if told from a different perspective?

III. Students will share their findings and source evaluations in a whole class discussion. Because students come from different racial backgrounds and have different experiences, they could bring all of their ideas together and learn from each other.

IV. As a group, the students will come up with a variety of solutions to this problem.

Although this lesson plan be developed with more detail (for example a step by step outline), it provides a basic idea of how I would incorporate essential questioning into my classroom. This topic will have students wanting more. More answers. More solutions. More discussion. And that is what we want in our social studies classrooms!

To conclude, when we include essential questions into our curriculum, we are making students dig deeper; we are offering multiple perspectives. We are asking them to collect evidence, consider claims and come up with a solutions/conclusions that students believe are relevant.