With a strong content angle and a good compelling question in place, it's time to think about the outcomes of the inquiry. Ask yourself, what do you want your student to learn in this inquiry? Put another way, how do you anticipate they will answer the compelling question? This is classic backward design and closely connected the the central tenants of Understanding by Design. With this step in the design process, we're getting the end of the inquiry in mind to prepare for our next phase, Filling the Inquiry.

Stress testing the compelling question is a simple process. What we need to do is answer the compelling question to demonstrate that it's arguable. Inquiry designed with IDM should lead to an argument. An argument is a proposed answer to a question that is among several possibilities. Arguments are comprised of claims with evidence from authoritative sources. When designing an inquiry, we ask teachers to write something we call argument stems. An argument stem is a truncated or condensed representation of an argument. You might think of an argument stem as a claim. A claim is something that we believe to be true, but requires support in the form of evidence. Knowledgable people may disagree about claims and draw upon different evidence to support their claims.

If we return to our Civil War inquiry, the teachers who designed it thought of three possible argument stems.

• Words can lead to war when words, such as the words in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,​ help people ​to ​express their disagreements with others.

• The causes of the Civil War and most other wars are very complicated and cannot be boiled down ​​to​ words in a book such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

• It is difficult to determine the extent to which Uncle Tom’s Cabin contributed to the Civil War, but the book did support abolitionism.

Summative Performance Task

The reason we call this first phase of the inquiry design process Framing the Inquiry is because we are working on the top and bottom of the inquiry blueprint. The top of the blueprint is the compelling question and the bottom is the summative performance task. That summative task is where students will make their argument. This is a constant in the IDM design process. It's so constant, we think you can just use the same text ever time you write a summative performance task. Here is the summative task from the Uncle Tom's Cabin inquiry.

Can words lead to war? Construct an argument (e.g., detailed outline, poster, essay) that discusses the impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin using specific claims and relevant evidence from historical sources, while acknowledging competing views.

Just use that text and replace the compelling question with yours and replace the content referenced with yours. That's pretty simple, but don't worry there' plenty of complex stuff to focus on here with argument stems!