Hi, this is Jenny with crafted, I want to address a really common question that I get which has to do with what we call an acronym soup and that is what is the difference between a driving question and essential question in enduring understanding.

So, enduring understanding is what I call like the big umbrella and it’s very much rooted in backwards design but it’s the whole big picture of what students are going to be learning, so when we come up with her and during understanding, it’s a teacher statement and it has to do with what we hope students will remember long-term, underneath that and during understanding is what we call the driving question in PBL and the driving question is teacher generated and it has to do with the question that we hope students are going to grow with as they move throughout the project and be able to evolve and how they answer that question, all learning should be in service of that driving question

Different from essential questions, essential questions are questions that are really important for students to answer any number of benchmarks or any number of days might have their own smaller essential questions they’re very specific, whereas a driving question is bigger, broader and more general open-ended, an essential question is much more specific

So, you can kind of think of it in layers, EU and during understanding up top, driving question below that and essential question below that.

Hope that helps clear things up?