by Lee Watanabe-Crockett | Essential Questions
Asking meaningful questions is a cornerstone of learning and living because it’s a practice we use every day. In fact, the majority of our success in life depends on asking the best questions followed by making the best decisions. In education, the benefits of... 
by Lee Watanabe-Crockett | Essential Questions
The Essential Fluencies are a solid foundation for effective modern learning. They cover all the bases of the skills students need for success beyond school. Developing these Fluencies in our students is a critical thinking journey in itself. That’s why... 
by Lee Watanabe-Crockett | Essential Questions
When it comes time to grade assignments from your learners, anything can happen. From incomplete or unlabelled work to chronic illegibility and partial referencing, it’s all on the table. To that end, this list of useful assignment checklist questions will help... 
by Lee Watanabe-Crockett | Critical Thinking
Question stems are more than just for leading to answers—they are the pathways to developing exceptional critical thiking skills. When we ask an essential question to our learners, we also incorporate “herding” questions throughout the journey. These are... 
by Lee Watanabe-Crockett | Global Digital Citizen
Authentic learning is a useful approach for encouraging our learners to develop the critical thinking skills and confidence needed to tackle real-life situations. However, it can be hard to get out of the more traditional mindset where the teacher is the source of... 
by Lee Watanabe-Crockett | Assessment
Multiple choice questions can be used as a quick way to diagnostically assess a student’s recall and understanding for a particular subject. Here are some guidelines for writing effective multiple choice questions to diagnose prior learning of concepts or theory. 1.... 
by Lee Watanabe-Crockett | Essential Questions
Editor’s note: This is an updated version of our original article on essential questions examples featuring new links to useful EQ tools and more. So many essential questions examples, so little time. Grant Wiggins once said, “The big-idea questions signal... 
by Lee Watanabe-Crockett | Essential Questions
Self-reflection presents some of the most powerful instructional opportunities in our classrooms and workplaces. Its potency is in how it exercises multiple skills. We’re talking about the skills that make our students successful, such as critical thinking,... 
by Lee Watanabe-Crockett | Essential Questions
Checking understanding is a critical ongoing aspect of instructional guidance. Teachers ask questions of students to discover both what they know and what they have yet to learn. They also use guiding questions to determine if prior knowledge is being used to link to... 
by Lee Watanabe-Crockett | Essential Questions
Successfully debriefing learning means having solid and meaningful reflective questions to use. No matter what you’re teaching, every learner can benefit from asking reflective questions at the end of their journey. We have a list of 15 here that are pretty much...