Driving Questions

What’s key:

• Grabs student interest (provocative, intriguing, urgent, relevant, engaging)
• Open-ended (can’t Google your way to an answer)
• Connects to key learning goals
• May include a call to action

Think about how you might revise this question: What causes earthquakes?

To add local context, you might ask: How can we prepare for a natural disaster in our region?

To incorporate a call to action, you might ask: How can we convince our school board to make our school earthquake-proof?

To emphasize specific learning goals, you might ask: How can we, as oral historians, record and share the stories of people who lived through the worst disaster in our community’s history?

Your turn: On your own, revise the following driving questions to make them more engaging, open-ended, academically rigorous, or action-oriented:

1. What are habitats?

Your turn:

2. What caused World War II?

Your turn:

3. How do poets use metaphors?

Your turn:

Talk it over: Compare your revisions with team members. Which versions are more relevant? open-ended? rigorous (aligned to learning goals)? right-sized (not too big, not too narrow)?

If you were a student, which question would you find most intriguing. Why?

For more tips on improving driving questions, read this blog post by John Larmer from BIE.org.