“Unwrapped” Essential Standards and Student Learning Targets focus on what students are to learn, and Success Criteria focus on how students will show they have learned it. The reasons why the “unwrapped” concepts and skills in Essential Standards are important for students to understand and be able to express in their own words are known as the Big Ideas. Big Ideas often occur to students during the “Ah-ha!” moments of the learning process, particularly when teachers guide their students to make connections and draw conclusions about what they have been studying.

This chapter describes and illustrates how educators generate Big Ideas from the “unwrapped” Essential Standards and why doing so is one of the most powerful instructional strategies they can use to help students retain what they have been taught—and what they have learned—long after instruction ends.

Related Workshop:

COMPOSE BIG IDEAS AND CREATE ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS