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• Core-focused: The learning objective poses the question.  It is the essence of what students should examine and know in a course of study. The same question can be re-asked throughout a main subject (for example, Math), but with increasing levels of sophistication.
• Inquiry-based: The question is open-ended and resists an obvious simple or single right answer.  It precludes a creative choice that transforms the search for knowledge.
• Reinforce Thinking Skills:  Requires students to draw upon content knowledge, personal experience, and other information they have gathered to construct their own answers.  It causes students to search for an answer using critical thinking (ultimately using Bloom’s higher order thinking).
• Interdisciplinary: They usually lend themselves to multidisciplinary investigations, requiring for example, that students apply the skills and perspectives of math and language arts to social studies or science.
• Engaging: Should be created to provoke and sustain student interest. Engaging questions are thought provoking, likely to produce interesting student questions, and take into consideration diverse interests and learning styles.

After reading through the information on what makes a quality essential question, a teacher realizes it’s more that identifying the day’s learning objective.  The question pulls the students into the lesson even before the lesson begins.  It sparks interest, makes a connection, stirs debate. Definitely worth the time to consider and post.  Refer to the guide to see samples of effective essential questions.