This waffle eventuated from my daughters' pupil free day.
I appreciate the extensive contact their school keeps with us through emails. It's an exceptional school.
But this had me forgetting what I started to read as each sentence went on.
"Last Friday teachers spent time considering the use of questioning in the classroom. Our focus was on beginning to work with Essential Questions – those questions that go to the essence of things and are foundational to all knowledge and wisdom. These questions provide a frame for students’ thinking about the learning they engage with in each specific subject or learning area.
An Essential Question in English may be “How do stories from another time and place have meaning for me?” or “How does language help me make (or communicate) meaning?” In Science, students might be considering “What is healthy living? “ or “How do objects move?” In Humanities students might consider “What makes people choose where they live and how they live?” “Why do people move?” “What can we do to contribute positively to our environment?”
These questions can be cast in simple language for our youngest students and become increasingly sophisticated as students pass through their schooling.
The value of using Essential Questions to frame teaching and learning lies in their power to generate other more specific questions that tap into the student’s immediate interest and level of thinking. Essential Questions are open-ended and have no simple, direct answer. They provide the foundation for thinking about life and our world, where investigating and formulating possible answers is a lifelong adventure.
We are embarking on a process that will enable us to identify a number of Essential Questions that the content of the Australian Curriculum invites us to pose. This approach examines the content and asks, “If this (the content) is the answer, what was the question?” An Inquiry Based learning model that engages students at every level with learning they will find relevant and purposeful has Essential Questions at its foundation.
As they pass through our College, our prayer is that each student, like the child, Jesus, will “grow in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52). With lives anchored in the unchanging truths that God is, was and always has been; God alone is holy; God is just; they will have the foundation upon which to mature in wisdom as they continue to learn and question throughout their lives."
