Burke – Using Essential Questions to Design Your Own Units

In this chapter, Burke provides the final resources and suggestions for teachers to begin designing inquiry-based instructional units.  He emphasized that, “such units are best designed through collaboration”.  This statement instantly sent my wheels in motion.  Our school district now requires teachers to meet in Professional Learning Teams, or PLT’s for 30 minutes a week.  If administration does not send us specific instructions on what to do each week, we wind up doing nothing.  Why should busy administrators have to take time to plan what we as professional educators must specifically be doing each week?  Our school has already introduced the concept of designing lessons around essential questions.  That is what this time should be used for.  Each team should be required to develop one unit per quarter.  Since full implementation of Common Core Standards (which this type of unit development fully supports) will begin in the 2014-2015 school year, the 2013-2014 school year could be spent building this “bank” of units that teachers can use to implement inquiry-based instruction AND Common Core Standards.

I am currently in the pool for a teacher leader position for the 2013-2014 school year, and this is exactly the type of initiative that I would like to bring to my school as a teacher leader. 

Burke stated that standards-based instruction can easily take place within the inquiry-based unit.  When beginning to develop such units, teachers must determine what ideas and questions arise naturally and use those to design a unit around.  Appendix D in the book is entitled, “Designing a Standards-Based Curriculum” and contains numerous resources to help implement this type of planning.

Burke closed the book by sharing three “fundamental and well-established principles of learning that are particularly important for teaching” from Linda Darling-Hammond’s book Powerful Learning: What We Know About Teaching for Understanding (2008).

In short, these principles are:

1. Connect students’ prior knowledge to new concepts being taught.
2. Students must not only learn facts, but also learn how to “organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application”.
3. Teach students to “take control of their own learning by having a set of learning strategies, defining their own learning goals, and monitoring their progress in achieving them.”

In order to implement the above-mentioned principles, Darling-Hammond added the following suggestions for teachers:

• Create meaningful activities that connect to real-world skills.
• Use active-learning processes to engage students.
• Connect activities to students’ background knowledge on the topics being discussed.
• Scaffold the learning process based on the specific needs of students.
• Continuously assess student understanding and adapt instruction as needed.
• Make learning objectives clear, provide constant feedback to students and allow time to work on important tasks in class.
• Encourage metacognition and student ownership of the learning process.

The suggestions provided in this chapter are reminders of highly-effective teaching methods in any situation, but are especially helpful to keep in mind as one begins the process of developing thought-provoking and engaging lessons designed around essential questions.

Burke also provided the following resources to aide in the planning process:

Planning Table

Academic Essentials Planning Guide

Unit Planning Sheet

Burke Ch. 4 Meaningful Conversations

In this chapter Burke explained how to determine what the essential questions should be when creating one to guide a unit using a required text.  He stated that students must be engaged in meaningful conversations in order to understand the text and remain engaged.  He emphasized the importance of choosing an essential question that can withstand “prolonged inquiry” (p. 130) and developing assignments within the unit that will enhance a wide range of skills and knowledge.

He used a unit he created around the novel, Of Mice and Men as an example.  The essential question that this unit was designed around is “Am I my brother’s keeper?”.  The unit began with a brainstorming of the significance of the novel’s title, a search on Google Earth of the California valley in which the novel takes place, and the use of photography from the 1930’s to prompt writing and discussion.  By incorporating these multimedia elements and engaging discussions, this dusty old novel is introduced with renewed vitality.

During reading students must keep notes that include character descriptions, predictions, connections and inferences.  These are exactly the types of critical reading skills that standardized tests require of students, only cleverly disguised as part of the reading of a novel rather than as “test prep”.  According to Burke, “Effective teachers embed test preparation into their instruction, making it a more authentic component of the curriculum without making it the point of the curriculum” (p. 137).  I suspect that students react much more positively to this than they would to a passage from a test preparation book, yet the skills they will develop are the same.  Much of the problem that teachers encounter with students during test preparation is lack of engagement, but I suspect that this unit would be far more engaging to students and would actually result in deeper learning.

To bring students to a place where they are truly prepared to respond to the essential question, it is important to include several texts that explore the topic in different ways. Burke had students analyze a Red Cross advertisement that points out our responsibility towards each other.  He also had students read essays from the collection called A Hand to Guide Me by Denzel Washington.  It includes Washington’s personal story of his mentor, as well as the stories of many other celebrities.  These essays would certainly appeal to students’ interests, and would allow students some choice of which essays to read.  The next step would be for students to write their own essays about a mentor or ally that has impacted their lives.  Another assignment required students to read Barack Obama’s 2004 speech, “I Am My Brother’s Keeper” and write about it on a blog.

I was truly inspired by this unit and the wide range of engaging texts and activities that it includes.  It made me wish that Of Mice and Men was a part of my curriculum so that I could teach this unit in its entirety.  I know, however, that the point of Burke sharing these units is not so that other teachers can steal his work (although I’m sure students across America would still benefit).  The point is to show examples of thoughtfully-designed units to serve as models for teachers.  I am excited to look over next year’s curriculum and take our required texts and turn them into exciting, engaging and thought-provoking units such as these.

Here are links to the graphic organizers and other documents Burke created for this unit:

Event Notes
Ally Essay Prompt
Of Mice and Men Online Socratic Seminar

Thematic Unit - 90 Miles to Havana

My team and I have been working on a webquest with an anti-bullying theme.  The webquest consists of before, during and after reading activities that 7^th grade students will complete as they read the novel 90 Miles to Havana by Enrique Flores-Galbis.  The before reading components provide students with background information about the Cuban Revolution, which is the backdrop of the novel and introduce the essential question, “What are the tactics that a bully uses to control and manipulate others and how can victims reclaim power from a bully?”.  During reading activities are designed to increase student engagement and comprehension and to increase vocabulary knowledge.  Many activities incorporate Web 2.0 resources such as Edmodo, Timetoast, and Wordle.  After students have finished reading they will investigate additional bullying resources on the internet and will work together as a class to produce a bullying awareness newsletter that will be distributed throughout the school.  We believe that middle school is such a pivotal point in children’s lives to consider the seriousness of bullying that this is an activity that will benefit every student in school.

Here is a link to our webquest:

http://90milestohavana.weebly.com/