Good essential questions rarely emerge in the first draft. Common first-draft questions typically are convergent low-level questions designed to support content acquisition. They either point toward the one official "right" answer, or they elicit mere lists and thus no further inquiry. So how can teachers ensure that subsequent drafts meet the criteria for good essential questions? Authors Grant Wiggins and Denise Wilbur suggest seven ways to question your questions. These include self-assessing your draft question using a simple checklist of criteria; identifying the hard-to-understand but vital connections of ideas and making sure your questions point to those ideas; posing a question more generally about concepts such as friendship, war, ecosystems, and so on; familiarizing yourself with the most counterintuitive and commonly misunderstood aspects of the subjects you teach and building your questions around them; and building into your lessons meaning-making and application challenges that will raise essential questions.