ANCHOR STANDARDS, ENDURING UNDERSTANDINGS, ESSENTIAL
QUESTIONS
ANCHOR STANDARDS
Anchor Standards
Anchor standards describe the general knowledge and skill that teachers expect students to
demonstrate throughout their education in the arts. These anchor standards are parallel across
arts disciplines and grade levels and serve as the tangible educational expression of artistic
literacy.
ENDURING UNDERSTANDINGS AND ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Enduring Understandings
Enduring understandings and essential questions focus on what are often called “big ideas.”
Enduring understandings are statements summarizing important ideas and core processes that
are central to a discipline and have lasting value beyond the classroom. They synthesize what
students should come to understand as a result of studying a particular content area. Moreover,
they articulate what students should value about the content area over the course of their
lifetimes. Enduring understandings should also enable students to make connections to other
disciplines beyond the art.
Essential Questions
“Essential Questions that are not answerable with finality in a brief sentence.” Their aim is to
stimulate thought, to provoke inquiry, and to spark more questions including thoughtful student
questions—not just pat answers...instead of thinking of content as something to be covered,
consider knowledge and skill as the means of addressing questions central to understanding key
issues in your subject.” Essential questions also guide students as they uncover enduring
understandings. They are questions that encourage, hint at, even demand transfer beyond the
particular topic in which students first encounter them, and therefore, should recur over the years
to promote conceptual connections and curriculum coherence.
Understanding by Design – Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins; both served as advisors to the
national arts standards work.
Reading/Literature Example: from Grafton School District, Wisconsin
(http://www6.grafton.k12.wi.us/district/eclipse/essentialquestions/enduring.html )
This is an Enduring Understanding
Reading is a process by which we construct meaning about the information being communicated
by an author within a print or non-print medium.
This is an Essential Question
How is reading a process of constructing meaning from text?
OPALS: 2/2014 nc