Essential Questions

Chris VanSlooten | April 2009

This year, like most of my other years of teaching, started with a few days of “professional development (P.D).” Most of us in the teaching profession start our school years this way. And every year we have to decide whether or not we will change our practices based on what we are presented with.  This year I decided to change.  The P.D. this year was focused on Distinctively Christian Teaching.  I was immediately interested in the topic (which is not always the case for most teachers and professional development).  You see, I did not attend a Christian school in my formative years.  I did go to a Christian college, but I taught for my first two and half years in the public school system.  Having left the public schools to teach in a Christian school, I have wrestled with teaching in a distinctively Christian manner.  I had shown Christ’s love and compassion to my students in both places. How had my teaching in the Christian school been any different than in the public school?  Besides beginning class with prayer and daily devotions what was I doing differently to help my students think Christianly about my content, which in this case was math?

Over the course of the two days of P.D., we were presented with the idea of using essential questions (EQs) within our content.  I had heard of the notion of essential questions before, but had never thought of using them as a way to have students to think about their faith.  It was this idea of enhancing, challenging, and deepening my student’s faith through my content that effected a change in my teaching practice. 

So I took on the challenge of creating essential questions for my Pre-Calculus classes this year.  Two issues immediately arose.  First, good, thought-provoking essential questions were not as easy to create as I first thought. Second, how would I get my students to engage in taking the questions seriously?  I had taken a class for my master’s program previously in the summer that had brought up the notion of “publishing” students’ works. “Publishing” adds an ownership to the students in which they are more cognizant of the fact that someone else may be reading their writing.  Some students even gain confidence from seeing others read their work, and others enjoy the chance to read the responses of their classmates.  I chose to use a blog to publish my students’ EQ responses for a few reasons.   One, they are easy to use and my students are quite familiar with them.  Two, they give my students a worldwide audience, and three,  I have been utilizing a blog for posting homework, grades, other things for classes since I started teaching so using a blog as a publishing device for my students’ responses seemed a good fit. 

With the blog as the place of publication, I created the EQ process.  At the end of every unit in my Pre-Calculus classes I present students with three EQs.  Students choose one of the three and have a week to e-mail me their response.  I compile all of my students’ responses, allowing for me to keep them anonymous and make any necessary editing (I only edit by changing names used in responses and checking for appropriateness) and post all the responses on my EQ blog for anyone to read.  Students, parents, teachers, school administrators, and pastors have read the response my students have created.

I was not sure how students would react to the idea of working with EQs, but was amazed at the initial responses I received, and continue to be impressed with what my students are writing.  There are numerous resources out there for the development of essential questions that can be found with a simple “Google” search.  I will admit, not all of my EQs meet all the characteristics of a good essential question, but they do get my students to make connections with the math they are learning and their faith.  Now my students are thinking beyond sine, cosine, and parametric equations and pondering thoughts such as “Did Jesus come to Earth to be an inverse?” “Are Humans coterminal?” and “Does God know all of the decimals of π if it is never ending?”

I will continue implementing EQs into my teaching.  I have found them to be one thing that makes my teaching more distinctively Christian.  And my students for the most part seem to enjoy them.  Let me quote a couple of them:

"These EQs have helped me grow as a student and as a Christian. I have learned that if God can be related to math, he can be related to anything. When relating math to God, I see it in a different context and it helps me to better understand the concept we are learning in class. Over the semester, I have learned that God can be related to even the most unexpected things in life."

"In answering these thought provoking questions, I believe that I have grown to have an even more opened mind. I didn't think that math and my faith could be mixed. Essential Questions have caused me to believe that EVERYTHING, including math, is of God."

If you are looking for a way to change how you teach, or want to challenge your students to think about God within your content, consider using essential questions in your classroom.  I also encourage you to find a way to “publish” your students’ responses to encourage them to carefully craft responses that are meaningful to them.

Feel free to check out my Pre-Calculus EQ Blog at http://vanslootenprecalceqs.blogspot.com/
Or my Math Blog at http://vanslootenmath.blogspot.com/

Chris VanSlooten is a Math teacher at Rehoboth Christian School in Rehoboth, New Mexico.