Driving Questions
The driving question is the "big picture" question. It engages students in meaningful inquiry by focusing on a locally relevant environmental problem, issue, or phenomenon.
Driving questions are important for sparking curiosity and organizing inquiry that happens throughout a MWEE. The teacher defines the driving question to place the MWEE within their curriculum and to address specific learning standards or leverage existing resources or programming.
Criteria for Effective Driving Questions:
- Supports learning objectives (i.e., knowledge, skills, and attitudes)
- Serves as a context for both increasing content knowledge and practicing inquiry and methodological skills
- Open-ended (i.e., arguable, with no single, final, or correct answer)
- Relevant and related to students’ lived experiences
- Anchored in real-world environmental and social problems
- Affords the opportunity for continuity and coherence across the MWEE
- Provides the opportunity for students to develop and explore supporting questions as knowledge and understanding evolve
- Provides opportunities for environmental action
- Allows students to design and enact investigations that yield answers
- Calls for higher-order thinking, including analysis, inference, prediction, and evaluation
- Allows for the exploration of both natural and social systems
Examples of driving questions include:
- How is my community impacted by climate change?
- How does the way the land is used surrounding my school affect the Little Conestoga Creek?
- How do human activities impact the local bird population?
- How do local and state policies impact polluted runoff and, should more be done?
- How do trees at our school and in the community impact human health?
Supporting Questions
Supporting questions help find the missing information needed to develop potential answers to the driving question. Ideally, they are generated by the students or co-developed by students and educators. They should uncover the students' current knowledge about the issue, create interest, and begin to frame an investigation that addresses the driving question in a local context.
Supporting questions provide an opportunity to bring in a variety of subject disciplines, strengthening the life-relevant and authentic contexts for learning.
If our driving question was "how do trees at our school and in our community impact human health?" examples of supporting questions could include:
- How many trees are in our community and at our school?
- What do trees need to survive?
- Who decides where and what types of trees get planted in our community? Who takes care of the trees?
- How do trees benefit wildlife?
- How can trees benefit people?
- Are some trees better for our community than others?
MWEE Case Study
The high school MWEE out of Pennsylvania has appeared in a few case study videos so far. We are going to use this MWEE to show more details about the planning and logistics for each of the essential elements.
We will start with a page the teacher used to connect the driving and supporting questions (developed and co-developed by students and the teacher) her class investigated during the MWEE to the standards. You may also find it useful to do something similar while planning and later reviewing your MWEE so you can connect the lessons you are already doing to the MWEE issue and driving question.
Start by connecting your lessons and the corresponding supporting questions then, after the MWEE is complete, add in the supporting questions that were developed or co-developed by you and your students. Use the Asking Questions and Planning Investigations student worksheet to help your students brainstorm their own supporting questions and investigations.
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