We have divided our course into units and have created guiding questions after carefully unpacking standards that our students need to know. We have collaborated with our colleagues to refine our guiding questions and have posted them for our students to see. Now what do we do with them? Guiding questions not only drive excellent instruction but assist in lesson planning as well as student assessment. Guiding questions are central to daily, focused instruction and evaluation.

I am often surprised when I see a guiding question posted in a classroom, especially in a subject with unfamiliar content, and when I ask the teacher the answer to the question, the reply I get is a rather vague, sometimes general response without a real answer! Good guiding questions should not be so narrow as to limit the answer to a few words but be sufficiently broad to cover one or more targeted standards completely. While not written as part of the question, the answer must be a series of “sub-parts” that are the key facts and ideas that make up the answer to a question. These are points that a student who has mastered the standards included in the question, would be expected to discuss if that student was verbalizing a complete answer to it. The question posted should pique a student’s interest enough that the student will begin to put together the answer to the question from his or her own perspective as the lesson is developed. Each student may have a slightly different take on the answer to the question but through developmental conversation and teacher guidance, key points of the guiding question’s answer should be discovered.

Guiding questions are also essential to a teacher’s lesson planning and collaboration. Teachers, in collaboration with colleagues, will determine the key points in answering a guiding question and use these points to develop lessons that will convey these ideas to students. A student’s ability to formulate answers to the questions using ideas presented in the lesson will determine whether instruction should move forward or be repeated. It is this constant evaluation of a student’s content knowledge that should drive the instructional cycle, not time spent covering material in the lesson! It is also the questions which should drive teachers’ collaboration as they seek to determine the most effective ways to communicate the ideas included in a particular question to students. Collaborative planning, lesson presentation, evaluation and adjustment, all based on the guiding questions, are key to a well organized and student-learning focused classroom.

Like other parts of the student learning cycle, assessment is also based on well-developed guiding questions. When teachers have carefully developed answers to the guiding questions they teach, assessment becomes a simple process of checking to see if students know the “big picture” answer and know what correct pieces are included in the answer. Daily informal checks for understanding might include only a limited part of the overall answer while end-of-unit tests might look at a broader understanding and require broader and deeper discussion by students in demonstrating their understanding of the subject. Assessments should be carefully developed in collaboration with co-teachers as a way of checking for student understanding of the topics and standards addressed by guiding questions in the unit.

So, what do we do with guiding questions after we have developed them? The answers is, everything! Guiding questions focus our lesson planning, are the target of our collaborations, drive our daily instruction and define our assessments. The use of guiding questions leads to consise instruction, standards driven assessment and excellent student learning.