Judith S. Goodrich
The Essential Question
An essential question leads the students to use higher-order thinking skills to seek out knowledge. Students will be required to use the information they gather to analyze, synthesize, and make evaluative judgments. The student is always asked to “go beyond” the information given to develop a response that is personal, thoughtful, and supported by evidence.
Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe have created a guidebook for designing the essential question and understanding its theory and application in the classroom in
Understanding by Design: Curriculum and Assessment.
When creating an essential question to use to focus a curriculum unit they recommend that the question
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go to the heart of a discipline: They can be found in the most historically important (and controversial) problems and topics in the sciences: What is adequate “proof” in each field of inquiry?
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have no one obvious “right” answer:
essential “answers” are not self-evidently true. Even if there are “truths” and essential theories in a discipline, the student comes to know that there are other plausible theses and hypotheses to be considered and sorted through along with the “sanctioned” views.2
In this unit I am using the question --
Is the history of the growth of a city a history of progress?
In 8th grade we typically explore the idea of progress by looking at the expansion of America through Manifest Destiny, the changes of the industrial revolution, the growth of railroads and the impact of immigration on American life. In this new unit, I think that focusing specifically on the machines and engines that changed the physical and social ‘personality’ of so many cities across America, will capture the attention of my 8th graders in a concrete way. Students will select a city and identify an industry, a mode of transportation, or an innovation that used a heat engine that had a significant impact on the life and development of that locale. Students will be able to investigate a range of issues about the city in order to answer the essential question. The students will look at why the application of a particular heat engine occurred in that location and how it affected the society. The students will look at how efficiently the machines and mechanisms used energy and how their use affected the environment. They will examine the cost of these innovations both in economic and human terms.
Students will pursue the subtle effects of technological advancements on the environment, social structure, the meaning of work, and the health and growth of the city. An obvious example of the project could be the development of Lowell, Massachusetts after the textile mills became the main focus of the economy in that area. Another possibility would be to examine the benefits that the steam powered cable cars brought to the growth of San Francisco. In Portland Oregon, steam drove the saws of the lumber mills and in Trenton, New Jersey, steam powered the electric plants of the 1910s.
Understanding aspects of energy use and the efficiency of the machines that use energy (such as engines) can be related to the 8th grade American history curriculum. Wind drove the ships that moved the explorers to the New World; water wheels turned the gears and drives of mills that ground wheat to flour and cut trees to lumber; steam powered the textile looms and moved the locomotives and steamships across America. The combustion engine revolutionized travel and transportation and opened the door for countless new uses for the heat engine in industry. The turbine engine led to wider use of electricity and air travel and flights into space. These developments occurred in real places with real people -- cities grew as innovation in industry and transportation pulled people from the farms.
The students will explore these concrete examples from history to help them formulate an interpretive view. Once they select and examine the elements of an engine system (its structure, its fuel, its efficiency and waste, its ‘product’ and cost) at work in a city, students will step back from the data to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of that particular development in the history of the town. They will look briefly at the same city in the 21st century to find connections or notice changes from the city a century ago. Students will conclude their study by thinking for themselves about a definition of progress in American history -- is progress, although inevitable, always a good thing?
In high school, students will need to demonstrate their ability to apply knowledge and learning on a standardized test (CAPT); I think that the ability to research and use facts and data to evaluate a theme is a useful step in developing skills to achieve this goal. I hope that the students will make the connection that innovation in all sorts of technology (not just heat engines) has an impact on the world that they live in, and that thinking about a complex question can generate even more curiosity and more questions about a topic.