Seminarium

The Elements of Great Teaching

Hey, Instructors: Show Us Your Essential Questions!

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I’ll show you mine, nurse and you can show me yours.

I have written before on designing a course “backward” from essential questions, using the “Understanding by Design” system created by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. Also here at Seminarium, others have described their own experience with “Understanding by Design.” A key idea is that we teach, not so that the learners will acquire particular facts in our subject matter, but so that they will develop enduring understandings that can be transferred into other contexts and subject matters. Toward this end, early in the process of designing or revising a course (“Intro to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible”) or unit (“Latter Prophets”), you want to come up with the “big ideas” and “essential questions” toward which the assessments, activities, and resources are oriented. These are my own, for the course “Introduction to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.”

Some definitions, all drawn from the glossary of Understanding by Design, 2nd ed.:

1. Big Ideas: “The core concepts, principles, theories, and processes that should serve as the focal point of curricula, instruction, and assessment.” These should be important, enduring, and “transferable beyond the scope of a particular unit.”

2. Essential Question: “A question that lies at the heart of a subject or curriculum…and promotes inquiry or uncoverage of a subject.” A question “about which thoughtful and knowledgeable people may disagree.”

3. Overarching Essential Question: An essential question that is not unit-specific.

4. Topical Essential Question: An essential question that is unit-specific.

5. Non-essential Question: A question that has one correct answer (a leading question), or a trivial question.

Big Ideas:

These are some of the “big ideas” that span my course as a whole.

  • Reading the Bible is always a cross-cultural experience.
  • Academic biblical studies is different from confessional “Bible study.”
  • The Bible is a library of composite texts that are substantively diverse in their understandings of God and of the world.
  • Reading for “the gist” tends to produce superficial readings that reinforce our existing presuppositions about the text. Close, active reading for detail tends to produce surprising readings that challenge our existing presuppositions about the text.
  • The “history behind the text” differs substantively from the “history in the text.” (Fretheim, The Pentateuch)
  • Texts not only reflect the world views in which they are produced, but also seek (through their rhetorical devices) to reproduce those world views in the reader.

Overarching Essential Questions:

For Wiggins and McTighe, these are questions that span all the units of a course. I also try to think of “overarching” as meaning, “having relevance outside this course altogether; relating to human experience broadly.”

  • What makes a “good reader”? What does it mean to “read well”?
  • Can you “check” your own biases? Can you “see” you own world view?
  • What do we mean when we say a text/utterance “means” something?
  • What makes a text/utterance “true”?
  • What does it mean for a text/utterance to be “authoritative” for a person?
  • Does the universe tend toward justice?
  • What does it mean for speech to be “prophetic”?
  • What is “faith”? Can complaint, or charge of wrongdoing, be “faithful”?
  • Does an text/utterance mean the same thing to anyone, anywhere, at any time? How or now not?
  • What is “the good life”?

Topical Essential Questions:

These are essential questions that are course-specific, and sometimes even unit-specific.

  • In what ways might one consider biblical texts to be “authoritative” for one? In what ways might one not?
  • In what ways can biblical portraits of God be described as “diverse”? In what ways not?
  • How many meanings can a text sustain? Where does a text’s meaning “sit,” or reside?
  • What is, “the Bible”?
  • What is “the gospel”? Is “the gospel” to be found in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible? How or how not?
  • How does the text at hand understand God’s role in unameliorated injustice? In unmerited suffering?

Examples of Non-essential Questions:

  • Describe how the creation stories differ in their accounts? In what ways do they resist harmonization?
  • Describe what activities and genres characterize “prophecy” in the ancient Near East and in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.
  • Describe in detail the theological perspective of the Deuteronomistic History. Give examples of how its sources sometimes resist that theological perspective.
  • What are the differences between “conventional” wisdom and “dissenting” wisdom in the wisdom literature of the ancient Near East and the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible?
  • What is the difference between a literary character and a person? Between a story and a sequence of events? Between portraiture and reality?

Assignments that might arise from “essential questions”:

As part of a take-home “Unit Exam” on the Latter Prophets, I recently gave the following assignment. It included rubrics and additional guidance not included here. My hope is that you can see where some of the “big ideas and essential questions” above have given rise to an assignment of this type.

On 12 April 1963, in response to nonviolent protests organized by Dr. Martin Luther King, eight White clergymen wrote this open letter (PDF). In rebuttal, on April 16, Dr. King published his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

Read the clergymen’s “Call for Unity,” and read also King’s open letter.

Now–and please, without any reference whatever to the text of Amos 5–analyze Dr. King’s letter as “Prophecy.”

Part One: Making reference to as many of the biblical prophets as you reasonably can, as well as to our course materials (e.g., on prophetic activities, genres, and historical contexts in the ANE and HB/OT), explore what analogies suggest themselves between the realities of Dr. King’s time (segregation, economic realities, moderate churches, Jim Crow, television, etc) and those of the various biblical prophets.

Part Two: Reflect explicitly on the differences among the biblical prophets, such that these differences (in historical context, in what’s bugging them, in what they want to happen) make an sweeping analysis like this one especially challenging.

What “big ideas and essential questions” might be appropriate to your own courses? What suggestions can you make about my own “big ideas and essential questions”?

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Brooke Lester, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in Hebrew Bible and Director for Emerging Pedagogies, at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary (Evanston IL). He received his degree in Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.

We are pleased that Brooke has agreed to serve as Seminarium’s curator, because – in his own words – I am an instructor who has “discovered” the scholarship of teaching and learning, and who talks about it with something of the fanaticism of the convert.

Brooke writes: There is a famous curse about being doomed to live “in exciting times,” and it’s not always fun to be living through the greatest upheaval in literacy since Gutenberg (or possibly since the dawn of writing), but, well…here we are!

My favorite thing about “digital learning” is that the stakes are in fact as high as we think they are: the digitization of language makes us talk together about how we really think learning happens, and then it makes us reconsider almost everything we think we know about that.

More insight into Brooke’s pedagogical “reconsiderings” can be found on his personal blog: http://www.anumma.com.