Cross Curricular
Help my students remember these confusing terms!
If you want students to memorize, you can’t aim for memorize. You have to aim higher – and then memorization comes along for free.
Going Beyond “Define These Terms In Your Own Words”
“Define these terms in your own words” may contain depth and complexity… but it’s neither deep nor complex!
Multiple Perspectives Gone Mad!!
Yes, I actually gave my students this question: “How could two experts’ 👓 perspectives regarding information from this reading selection differ from one another?” yikes.
Matching Flowers and Pollinators
How to add a couple of Analyze-level tasks to this Synthesize activity.
Depth and Complexity: The Icons, the Framework, and How to Actually Use Them
My biggest problem when implementing Depth and Complexity? I used them in a shallow and simple way!
Introducing Ourselves With Depth and Complexity and Frames
A go-to activity to introduce the prompts of depth and complexity to students while they also introduce themselves to their new classmates.
Create A Civilization: The River
Most humans want to live near fresh water, which means that most civilizations settled near a river! Let’s add a river to your students’ civilizations.
Curiosity Skill: Encouraging Students to Ask Other Students
If you want to make a massive change in the culture of your classroom, move from teachers asking students all of the questions to students asking each other questions!
Graphic Organizers Are Not Final Products
Ending with a Venn Diagram is like comparing two vacation spots… but never actually going on the vacation!
A Tessellation Art (and Math) Project
Let’s create an MC Escher-style tessellation art (and math) project with nothing more than an index card, a marker, and paper.
Concentric Circles – Getting Students to Think Bigger (and Smaller!)
This differentiation technique is called “Concentric Circles”. You use it to move students up and down the ladder of abstraction, applying a single idea in multiple contexts.
How long should we wait after asking a question?
I might ask the best questions in the world, but if I don’t give students even three seconds to think, those questions aren’t doing their job. Here’s what we know about Wait Time.
From “Summarize” to “Synthesize”
Even what seems like a low-level “summarize” task can become beautifully high-level when we climb Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Don’t Jump Straight to “Create”!
When we jump from “this kid likes board games” straight to “I’ll have them create a new board game”, we leave out important steps in the creative process and set kids up for disappointment (and end up with a lot of unfinished projects). Here’s how to scaffold a truly creative task.
Ask Sequences, Never One-Off Questions
Beware one-off questions. Any question that we prepare should have a natural follow-up question. And those follow-ups should push students up Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Focus on Thinking, Not the Product
When I was a new teacher, you would have seen some pretty fancy products hanging in my room, but if you stopped to consider how my kids thought about the content… well, often my students just restated facts that I had already told them.
Combining Depth and Complexity Prompts into a Generalization
Let’s start with a puzzlement, ask kids to generate an abstract statement, and then find evidence that their statement works across several different areas.
Sharpening Questions
With some small changes, we can turn fluffy opinion questions into thought-provoking evaluation questions.
Concept Formation: A Model for Inductive Thinking
Here’s are the steps for running an inductive lesson based on Hilda Taba’s model of Concept Formation. Plus a sample lesson about the Nile River.
Synthesize: Make A Change, Explain The Effect
I love the term “Synthesize” from the classic Bloom’s Taxonomy, but it can be hard to know exactly what it looks like. My favorite “Synthesize Recipe” is to ask students to make a change to existing content and then explain the effects of that change to me.
What could we do with this Wax Museum event?
How one might revamp a “Wax Museum” project into something that focuses more on thinking than product.
Students Need More Than Independent Work
It’s so easy to just ask advanced students to work by themselves in a corner. But, the more advanced the kid, the more they need advanced instruction and adult guidance.
Evaluate with Academic Tournaments
The bracketed tournament isn’t just for college basketball. Set up a tournament to determine best president, state, element, or literary character and challenge your students to make interesting judgements.
Which One is Not Like The Others?
When we ask kids “which one is not like the others”, our cleverest students love to find ways to pick the non-obvious answer. So why not use this as a framework for pushing students deeper into our content.
Creating Seemingly Unrelated Analogies
Want to encourage students to find unexpected connections across content? Here’s a quick framework based on the most important terms from both bits of content.
Make A *Better* Calendar!
The calendar is a source of fantastic factoring problems with many social studies add-ons. Why 12 months? Why 30 (or 31 or 28) days? Why are weeks 7 days long? Why don’t they fit into the months (or the year!)? Why did we do this to ourselves!?
Running A Curiosity Project
Merlin Mann stated that employees’ motivation increases when they get to “build a robot” once in a while. That is, do something creative beyond regular work. Can we do this at school? Offices have “casual Fridays,” can we have “curiosity Fridays?”
Fluency: Asking For (Way) More Than One Answer
Being able to generate many possible answers is key to high-level thinking. So why don’t we ask students to do it more often?
“Engagement” isn’t BAD, but…
“Engagement” is a nice by-product of a well-designed lesson, but it sure isn’t our actual goal as educators.
Paradox: Ship of Theseus
Here’s a fun thought experiment your students are sure to get a kick out of: when something is slowly replaced over time, is it still the same thing in the end?
Enrichment Must Prompt Thinking
Enrichment is not merely about doing fun things. It should never be just a project-of-the-week. It must be about getting students thinking in new and interesting ways. Here’s how!
Divergent Questions (How To Ask ‘Em)
How to ask Divergent Questions and ensure that your students are thinking rather than merely remembering.
Thinking From Anything’s Perspective
How a small change, with very little effort on the teacher’s part, leads to a delightfully complex task that can will get students thinking.
Why I don’t include “Explain Why” in Questions
I used to think that adding “explain why” to the end of a question somehow made it higher-level. But now I see two problems in asking students to “explain their thinking”.
Beware “Real World Problems”
Why I stopped looking for “real world” problems and started aiming for “interesting.” The real world is often tedious and annoying. Interesting never is!
Thinking Hats and Lunar Survival Skills
How Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats helped me solve a problem with my favorite group discussion task.
Phrases to Open Up a Discussion (Lunar Survival Skills Part 2)
One of my favorite open-ended, creative activities becomes even better with careful phrasing on my part. These three questions will help you be the facilitator of a discussion, rather than the authority.
Four Types of Questions You Can Ask
Asking questions is such a basic tool of teaching, yet how many of us have ever been taught to ask good questions? In this opening to a series about questioning, we’ll explore how to get students asking each other questions.
First Levels: Sentence Starters
As silly as it may sound, providing sentence stems or “fill in the blanks” can give your kids the scaffold they need to achieve a higher level of success.
Start A Lesson With A Music Video
I love collecting intriguing images and videos – things that stop me in my tracks and pique my curiosity. I always figure that if it fascinates me, students would probably be interested also. Often, these visuals work as wonderful hooks for a lesson you need to teach.
Create A Holiday
Take students beyond the decorations and ask them to identify what a holiday reveals about a culture’s values. Then, push them further as they develop their own holidays.
Get Students Out Of Creative Ruts
Sometimes students need a little structure to force them into a more creative state of mind. Here are a few ideas for interesting writing prompts
Classic Paintings for your Classroom
Exposing students to great pieces of art is an easy way to enhance a lesson, provide a visual way to practice a skill, and educate our students beyond the prescribed curriculum. Here’s a list of works that you can easily grab and use in your class.
Introducing “Criteria” To Students
Teaching our students to identify the criteria behind a decision will make them better decision makers and help them understand others’ points of views.
Create Your Own Civilization Project
Each year, my students created their own civilization to mirror what we were learning about Rome, China, India, and beyond.
Tickling Curiosity
Let’s look at a way to encourage and scaffold curiosity in our classes using a “Book of Unanswered Questions.” Begin by sharing intriguing objects or images and asking your own questions. Give kids a chance to find answers to their questions. Then encourage students to bring in their own intriguing conversation starters. Finally, move students towards curriculum based questions.
An Academic Twist on Valentines
Want to have some February fun? Let’s merge the idea of “going together like milk and cookies” with curriculum to create Academic Valentine’s Day cards!
Upgrading Questions with Key Words
How adding a single “key word” can upgrade your questions to a whole new level.
Lunar Survival Skills
We’re supposed to rank fifteen items according to usefulness if we were stranded on the light-side of the moon. The items range from pistols to powdered milk. Some seem useful, but are actually worthless while others seem unnecessary on earth, but are actually vital when stuck on the moon. However, the structure of the activity as a website is not optimal. Let’s improve this and make it an awesome problem–solving exercise for our class.
Group Investigation: Lessons Built on Curiosity
John Dewey’s Group Investigation is a favorite model of instruction of mine. It’s simply built on curiosity!
From Silent Reading To Creating Art
I’ve been continuing the idea to explore classic music during silent reaing, and incorporated Gustav Holsts’ “The Planets.” My students, who have an affinity for memorizing gods and goddesses, took a special interest in this idea. I figured, let’s see how far their interests will take us?
Ask Them Which Is Better
Moving from analysis to evaluation sure makes things more fun. Why? Check out these examples. Which would you rather answer?
No Street Names In Japan?
Do your learners use the tool 👓 multiple perspectives to analyze stories, problems, and historical events? Here’s a TED Talk about real-life multiple perspectives that will make your students (and you!) reconsider basic assumptions.
The Original Puzzlement: A Zoetrope
As teachers, I spend a ton of time searching for inspiration to enliven my lessons. But sometimes, inspiration hits as soon as you leave the desk and books behind. Friday my wife and I took a trip to Disneyland and saw this unbelievable (literally, it seems like magic) intersection of art & technology.
Remixing Stories With Gifted Students
One of my favorite ways to differentiate for gifted students is to create “remixes” of an existing idea. Students take an existing story, reshape it, and create a new product. It encourages them to explore the stories behind existing stories, helps them to understand how real writers work, and gives them a creative way to explore literature.
Introducing Universal Themes and Generalizations
Generalizations, big ideas, abstractions, universal themes… they are designed to help our gifted students learn. However, what I didn’t realize was that they would help me teach!