Identifying Essential Questions and Understandings
Design Tool with Prompts
Use one or more of the following questions to filter topics or big ideas to identify possible
essential questions and desired understandings.
Topics and Big Ideas:
Water Purification:
The need for safe, clean drinking
What essential questions are raised by this idea or topic?
What, specifically, about the idea or topic do you want
students to come to understand?
Why does water have to be treated?
How is ideal water described?
What makes the study of water become universal?
What are factors that indicate a country has clean drinking water or not?
What’s Big Idea implied in the skill or process of water’s purification?
What larger concepts, issue, or problem underlies polluted water?
How do mercury and other toxic pollutants go to the water supply?
What kind of disease could affect us?
How to treat this problem?
Essential Questions: Why does water have to be treated? How is ideal water described?
Understanding: Having clean drinking water is very important when it comes to human health. Ideal
water that free from bacterial contamination, Cholera and natural disaster, moreover Chemical
contamination that is safe to drink