A strong driving question accomplishes several goals: it provides students with freedom to explore their ideas; it invites collaboration; it provides a North Star to guide students’ work; and it inspires students to take action.
Typically, driving questions should be open ended; as a rule, your question should not have a ‘Googleable’ answer. Our team favors driving questions that start with, “How might we…” because the language implies a group effort, as well as open possibilities. However, you can tailor the scope of your question by including a specific lens, focus, or format. For example, “How might we use technology to tell the story of our community?” or, “How might we reduce waste at our high school?” These questions still invite students to explore a wide variety of solutions while placing parameters on the content or product.
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PBL: Driving Question Overview
A slide deck introduction and guidelines for creating driving questions.
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PBL: Co-Creating a Driving Question Using Rose, Thorn, Bud
A process for helping students define their own driving question.
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PBL: Crafting a Driving Question Using Abstraction Laddering
A challenge of “hows” and “whys” for discovering new driving questions.
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PBL: Pen Pal Schools Blog
The Pen Pal Schools Blog's approach to creating driving questions that help students see why their project is important.
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PBL: Essential Questions
Fifty examples of essential questions by subject area from the Wabisabi Learning website.
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