When teaching, it feels natural to center on powerful ideas or techniques. But it’s usually better to center on *questions*—ideas and techniques can follow. Ideally, they’re deep, meaningful questions with no “right” answer, an active object for experts in the discipline.
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e.g. If you're studying history, details are important, but usually in service of broad, enduring questions like "when and how do individuals make a difference?"
Wiggins & McTighe call these "essential questions" in Understanding by Design, a great text on instructional design.
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I love this idea but often forget it when I'm writing or giving a talk. Institutionalized education sets a bad cultural norm: a teacher's supposed to know the answers and tell them to you… not ask impossible questions! Obviously, I don't *believe* this, but it sneakily seeps in.
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This thread was prompted this sweng syllabus: cmu-313.github.io, which asks great questions: When and how much to design? How can we design security into a system? When is a program good enough to ship?
I've been coding 20+ years, and I'm still answering these questions!
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This list has many good questions across domains: teachthought.com/pedagogy/examp. e.g. When is the restriction of freedom a good thing? How does culture/society shape our concept of happiness?
Some of them are weak. It's a good exercise to try to sharpen them up!
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Instructional philosophy aside, q's are often just a more striking way to communicate. That sweng syllabus opens with strong (non-essential) questions: What can we learn from the Boeing 737 disaster? How did Twitter eradicate the Fail Whale? And what does it have to do with Ruby?
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A fun prompt: what are some essential questions in/around your field, open enough to be a focus for you but studied enough to meaningfully discuss in a course?
Here's one from my field: "What are the physical and practical limits to human cognition, and how can they be altered?"
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The fail whale never fully went away! (The actual image did, but service outages are still way too common)
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