Big Questiions - For a Successful Lesson

A big idea question could be: “How have money and other means of commerce taken shape throughout history and across different civilizations?” In the classroom, the teacher would lead a brainstorming session by posing this question and guiding students to think about how money and bartering have changed throughout societies. As students are brainstorming, the teacher’s role is to write all of the students’ ideas on an interactive board. Once students finish suggesting ideas, select students can come up to the interactive board to organize the collection of ideas into categories. Once the categories are organized, you can have students brainstorm possible sub questions for each category. Once sub questions are identified, as a collective group the class can then decide which questions and categories they want to work on and understand better. As the teacher, it is your responsibility to encourage students to identify key points about the topic that are of interest to them personally and to begin asking deeper questions to explore their interests further as they relate to the intended learning objective. Through this process of collaboration and investigation, students begin to understand the big idea of the lesson and the larger picture - their personal world.