Write Big Ideas
“By focusing instruction on big ideas, more mileage can be achieved with less instruction.”
Deshler & Schumaker, 2005
Big ideas are core concepts within a content area. They are foundational understandings students will remember long after instruction ends. These are the concepts you want students to discover as a result of the learning experience. Research demonstrates that when instruction is organized and taught around Big Ideas, students:
- understand how ideas, concepts, examples and details are connected
- comprehend content better
- retain essential information better
Guidelines to Determine Big Ideas
Will this Big Idea …. Apply to more than one content area? Apply to more than one grade level? Endure beyond a single school year enabling students to remember long after instruction ends? Big ideas are also “ah-ha!” moments student experience reaching on their own, key generalizations students can articulate, lasting and relevant understandings, and open-ended enduring ideas (Ainsworth & Viegut, 2006).
Examples of Big Ideas
Humans attempt to resolve these problems through ADMIT: accommodating, dominating, inventing, or tolerating.
Geography has an influence on people and their lives: where you live affects how you live.
Good readers and writers evaluate the reliability of sources and apply that in their writing.
Historical events are responses to economic or human rights problems.
All material in the universe is made of very small particles.
Think about a Big Idea from one aspect of your teaching. How does that big idea help students answer an essential question, master the learning target or connect prior knowledge to current learning?
Use the handout to record the big idea.
Write Essential Questions
Essential Questions provoke deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and additional questions leading to new and/or deep insights. Essential questions provide opportunities for students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support their ideas and rethink key ideas. EQs also support connections within and across content and context
Characteristics of essential questions:
- Cannot be answered with a “yes” or “no.”
- Have no single obvious right answer.
- Cannot be answered from rote memory.
- Match the rigor of the “unwrapped” standard.
- Go beyond who, what, when, and where to how and why (Ainsworth & Viegut, 2006).
Commonalities
- Open-ended.
- No one right or wrong answer.
- Thought-provoking.
- Provoking deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and additional questions leading to new and/or deep insights.
- Asking students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support their ideas and rethink key ideas.
Commonalities
- One answer
- Low level of rigor
- Does not provoke discussion
Use the handout to record the essential questions.