Core questions are s***…

… to teach with.

Core questions are a way of outlining the curriculum with high specificity. They give granular information about that is going to be taught.

BUT core questions aren’t the starting point for teaching, they should be the end result. Teachers should still teach so that students truly understand the material with the core Q acting to effectively summarise that understanding. But if you TEACH the core Qs and use them as the starting point and rote learn them, students won’t build any understanding at all (as they’ll rightly see them as disconnected facts).

So how do I use core Qs as a teacher?

• They ARE the starting point for PLANNING a new unit. I write a whole load of core Qs to ensure the topic is adequately covered and that I’m being as specific as possible about what will be taught.
• I use them to ensure my explanations have a general direction – this is where I’m aiming. But my explanation doesn’t start with a core question. It starts with examples and modelling and all the rest (as I want students to understand stuff).
• I also use core Qs as a check of understanding at the end of a topic/section/episode. But I’m not looking for word perfect answers.

So how do students use core Qs?

• They self quiz using them, but given they’ve not been taught them by rote – they’ve been taught to understand the material, I don’t expect their answers to be word perfect.
• Students should be able to see how their answers and the ‘correct answers’ are similar/different. And they should have a more developed understanding.
• They’re a great revision tool to help to wrangle the giant subject of science into something manageable. If students get core Qs for a particular topic wrong (i.e. nothing comparable to the “answer”), then this signposts them to more deeply revise this topic (and not just rote learn the “answer”).
• I get students to link core Qs together to show that these Qs are not disparate objects but summaries of different “bits” of their schema.