Depth and Complexity PD

For too long, I let my students turn in blah Big Ideas. Here’s how I fixed it.

Combine higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy with the prompts of Depth and Complexity!

Depth and Complexity is a powerful, but often misunderstood, framework for teaching students to think more like experts.

Can we get students as young as kindergarten discussing ethical issues? Learn some ideas for integrating these multiple perspective problems throughout your curriculum.

Here’s how I got better at using the Think Like An Expert technique.

This very common Depth and Complexity worksheet has many problems. And I used it for years!

Let’s improve “Create a title for this chapter. Explain why your title fits the 🏛️ Big Idea.”

My students made a list of problems… and we stopped right there.

My students listed Unanswered Questions and then… we moved on! Oops.

Even our youngest students can learn to think from multiple perspectives!

Learn to use the Content Imperatives, a set of five additional tools that work with Depth and Complexity.

I spent about a decade making some pretty major mistakes in my use of depth and complexity.

I asked “How could two experts’ perspectives regarding information from this reading selection differ from one another.” Yikes!

Let’s see a few examples of how Depth and Complexity slides nicely into any graphic organizer.

The Frame graphic organizer is a tool for studying one topic using four different angles.

Universal Themes are an easy way to connect lessons, units, and content areas, even going across grade levels, and into students’ personal interests.