FOCUS QUESTIONS
High quality interdisciplinary units should be investigations in which students gather, analyze, and present information. A unit focus question is essential for achieving this level of quality.
Focus questions are useful for teachers because they help you sort through all of the wonderful activities that are available and settle on the few excellent activities that help students conduct their investigation. They narrow the unit from a laundry list of everything remotely connected to the topic to something that is manageable. Focus questions also help a teacher keep the goals for the students, and the assessments for those goals, firmly in the foreground.
Focus questions are useful for students because they help them understand that the activities within a unit fit unto a big picture. Along the way, students will do thinking about the activities in terms of the questions. This ratchets their critical thinking up several notches. For example, instead of just doing some random activities about an iron smelting town that is a ghost town in Michigan, eighth grade students within the county consider the question, “How do you make a ghost town?” as they do carefully selected and designed activities.
In education courses, many teachers learned to write objectives or purposes for lessons and units. These are generally not written in language that grabs students’ attention. Well written focus questions, however, are intriguing to students. They should be aware of the focus questions.
You could write a focus “question” as a statement, for example, “Challenge this statement: A new landfill would be good for our community.” Just be sure to use student language.
There should be a focus question for the entire unit, and one or two focus questions for each content area. The buttons below will lead you to focus questions developed by three of the pilot teams. These are graphics, and may take a few seconds to download.
Should rivers be dammed focus questions Ghost town focus questions
