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Analyzing Conflict with the Content Imperatives

How to go deep into conflict using the Content Imperatives.

The Curse of Knowledge and Checking for Understanding

For Teachers

How knowing your material well easily becomes a curse… and what to do about it!

Complex Task: Subjective Graphs

For Teachers

What would it be like if students graphed characters from stories? Historic leaders? Elements from the period table? Objects in space?

Difficult vs Complex Tasks

For Teachers

What separates difficulty from complexity? And why do complex tasks lead to much more natural differentiation?

Writing Differentiated Lesson Objectives

For Teachers

My early lessons didn’t even have objectives, let alone good objectives! Here’s how to build four-part, differentiated lesson objectives.

A Lunar Survival Mission

A favorite of mine! This task is delightfully complex and ambiguous, forcing students to make choices without enough information and with no right answer. How will they survive on the moon for three days?

Complex Task: Academic Tournaments

For Teachers

Who would win in the Tournament of Least Useful Geometric Shapes or Bravest Shakespearean Characters? Create an academic tournament and watch your students’ brains sweat!

Developing Questions that Prompt Thinking in Math

For Teachers

Math is a particularly tricky subject for asking higher-level questions. Here are a couple of techniques I’ve used to prompt students to think, not merely calculate.

Fractions: Decompose and Recompose

What if we took a fraction apart, then took those pieces apart, then recombined them, and then recombined those, arriving back to the original fraction?

Inferring With Art: A Man

What’s going on in this painting? Who is that guy? What’s his job? And where’s his other boot?

Not Like The Others: Natural Disasters

Four natural disasters. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.

Measurement: A Long Movie

What if I told you a movie was a whopping 0.017 long? Could you figure out the unit I’m using? This lesson packs in strange measurements of time as well as tiny decimals.

Writing A Thanksgiving Letter

What if an inanimate object could express thanks for a special person in your life? What would it write?

Holiday vs Holiday (from a Mascot’s Perspective)

Want something to do during the holiday season that is both fun and involves thinking? Get students writing about what a snowman would think about Halloween or what a ghost would think about Thanksgiving.

Characters Dressed as Other Characters for Halloween

What if one character dressed up as another for Halloween? Would the Cat in the Hat pick Captain Jack Sparrow, because they’re both chaotic yet good-natured people? Would Elsa dress up as The Ice King since they are both lonely?

What If There Were No Hundreds Place?

Imagine a world with no hundreds place. We’d have to call it ten tens instead. But then, what would we call the thousands place? How would we read 9999? What if we added one more?

Complex Task: What Would X Think of Y?

For Teachers

Here’s a simple task that will add complexity to any content from any grade level!

Disneyland Parking Structure Math Project

Your students will use estimation strategies to figure out how many parking spots are there in the parking structure at Disneyland? And you bet I reveal the real answer!

Numerator or Denominator: Which has more power in a fraction?

What do you do with students who already get their fraction operations? Give them a contrived project about recipes or pizza slices? Make them solve annoyingly hard practice problems? Please. Here, we get students thinking in a whole new way, pondering which has more power, the numerator or denominator.

Parentheses: How big of a change can they make!?

Two tiny parentheses. One expression. How big of a change can they make? Bigger than you think.

Improving Wait Time

For Teachers

How much time do your students get to think after a question? Probably not enough. Here’s how to fix that.

Not Like The Others: Creatures of the Tundra

Four tundra creatures. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.

Not Like The Others: Planets

Which of these planets is not like others? Well, it sure looks simple at first. But each option could be the one that doesn’t fit in.

How Many Ways: Fraction Equivalence

How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?

The Tournament of Biomes

Want to move beyond memorizing the characteristics of biomes? In this lesson, students work through a Tournament of Biomes, explaining which biome wins in each round (based on criteria you choose). In the end, they crown a 👑 Champion Biome!

What’s In My Brain: Cute Baby vs Fast Cheetah

Can students spot similes vs metaphors?

Fraction Ordering Tournament

Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!

Writing A Story About Fraction Equivalence

When fractions take on a new denominator, it’s as if they’re wearing a disguise – same value, new look. So let’s write a story about fraction equivalence starring a fraction who needs to fit in with a new group.

Same Perimeter, Different Area For Rectangles

Can two rectangles have the same perimeter but… different areas!?

Undoing Multiplication With Division

Multiplication and division, natural foes, are constantly seeking to undo each other. Students will attempt to reverse the effects of multiplication by dividing once, twice, or even thrice!

Rounding Numbers (But Not To 10)

What could we possibly do to make rounding more interesting for students who already get it? In this series, students consider how they might round to values other than “the nearest 10.” How, for example, do we round to the nearest 9? 7? 15?

Place Value (Beyond Base 10)

Place value is something we cover in elementary school. It seems simple, but I’d wager that very few adults really understand the topic. I sure didn’t until I worked with non-base-10 number systems in college. Your students can get a taste of this mind-boggling experience by imagining what it would be like if we didn’t have the number 9. What would each digit represent then?

The Angles of a Triangle

Why tell a kid the rules of a triangle when they can discover them!?

Grouping Quadrilaterals In A Hierarchy

Can we classify quadrilaterals like we classify living things?

Finding The Volume of Laptops

How has the volume of laptops changed over time? You know you want to check out how huge those first versions were!

Synonym Graphs

So, which is happiest: happy, joyful, or ecstatic? Which is most temporary?

Showing A Character’s Trait

We tell students to ‘show, not tell’ — but that advice is useless until they experience the difference. This lesson makes it click.

Universal Themes

For Teachers

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

Visualizing Fraction Multiplication

What does it look like to multiply fractions?

Fraction Puzzlers: Add and Subtract Fractions To Reach A Number

You only have six digits to form three fractions. Can you combine them to get to 0?

A Visual Guide To Dividing By Fractions

Have you ever wondered what it looks like to divide by a fraction, man?

Creating A Realistic Flower and Pollinator

Your students will create a new flower, designed to attract a specific pollinator.

Analyze and Create Misleading Graphs

Let’s make some intentionally bad graphs to learn how to spot poorly made graphs.

Characters’ Talents and Multiple Intelligences

How do characters from novels line up with Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences?

Create A Creature

Create a new creature based on the adaptations of existing creatures from the same biome.

A Grid-Based Fraction Project

You’ve got 60 spaces on a grid to create an amusement park, a house, a farm, or whatever you’d like. Divide it into seven pieces, order it by size, combine into two halves, and more in this fraction project.