Essential Questions to ANCHOR Your High School ELA Unit Plans
Transitioning from Autonomy to Collaboration: A New Perspective in Inquiry-Based ELA Teaching
MAKING THE MOVE FROM THEMATIC UNITS TO INQUIRY UNITS
If you’ve been asked to start using Essential Questions in your units or are simply curious to learn more about what Essential Questions are, you’ve come to the right place. Let me start with a quick story…
When I started teaching, curriculum and alignment amongst our department was a free-for-all. We taught whatever we wanted in any order and felt we had wonderful autonomy. But then, we got a new boss. And she put us on teams. And before we knew it, we were hard at work learning the ins and outs of inquiry-based learning and driving units through Essential Questions.
I can tell you that from the very beginning, I resisted. I remember how much I pushed back against a seemingly new “initiative.” But after practice and working with a fantastic team, we finally figured out how incredibly powerful inquiry-driven instruction really is. To this day, this is the single most significant professional change to my practice that has made the most impactful difference in my student’s education.
Now, I’m here to share all of that with you.
Reframing Units: Putting Essential Questions at the Core
Reframing a unit so that the QUESTION is the center instead of the TEXT is a massive step toward equity, critical thinking, and engagement. But writing Essential Questions is just the beginning. We need to write them, design the units and thread the EQ from the beginning to the end, develop assessments around them, and so much more.
That’s where I come in. This is my specialty.
LET’S SEE WHERE YOU ARE IN YOUR EQ JOURNEY…TAKE THE QUIZ!
ESSENTIAL QUESTION ADVENTURE PACKS
These resources were designed to help teachers implement Essential Question based units right away without having to do the heavy lifting of question design and finding supplemental texts to fit the unit. Each EQ Pack is ready to teach alongside ANY corresponding text or set of lit circle texts that you ALREADY have lined up for your curriculum! Check out the questions below:
essential question BLOG POSTS TO SUPPORT INSTRUCTION
These blog posts will help you take your Essential Question experience to the next level.
PODCAST EPISODES to Support ESSENTIAL QUESTION DESIGN
Best Selling Resources FEATURING ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS & INQUIRY-DRIVEN INSTRUCTION
“Truly amazing resource. It was ready to go and my students and I found it so engaging and thoughtful. I am so excited to use this again this year and years to come!”
“I absolutely LOVED this resource, and the students were very engaged. I appreciate all of the hard work that clearly went into making this unit. Thank you!”
“As always, an exceptional product. The access to samples/templates and the clarity of the videos explaining how/why this skill is taught was so easy to understand and the author quick to respond to questions!”
“This resource was so helpful in updating my JC resources with engaging and relevant activities and made this unit fun to teach!”
Ready to build units like this with your team?
In Classics, Reimagined: Inquiry-Based Unit Design, I work alongside English departments to write essential questions for the novels they already teach and rebuild their units around them.
Essential questions drive Our Realm, one of the Four Reading Realms, where whole-class reading becomes a shared conversation.
EQ Possibility Map: eight ways to teach the essential question 'Are monsters born or made?' in secondary ELA