Techniques
So, how do we start writing differentiated lessons? These are a handful of my go-to techniques for designing a lesson that goes beyond the grade-level standard and gets kids thinking!
🚫 Anti-Techniques
These are ideas I used to believe that now I think aren’t actually so great. Oops!
❓ Ask Better Questions
I received surprisingly little training on how to ask questions, considering how many darn questions I asked!
🪄 Change, Then Explain!
My favorite way to reach “synthesize” – ask students to make a change and then explain the effects of that change.
🎥 Embed A Classic
Take out a boring sample and embed great art, music, film, tv shows, and other classics into your lessons.
🤭 Find The Controversy
Every topic has some juicy controversy. Leverage it! Look for ambiguity, disagreements, dilemmas, and discrepancies in any topic.
🐛 Fuzzy Problems
Fuzzy problems are ambiguous. They are missing data. They have lots of right answers, but (more importantly) they also have wrong answers.
💥 Get Ridiculous
Avoid boring examples and go for the outliers! Everything’s more interesting when you’re working with unexpected examples.
🔃 Think Big! But Also Small.
Get your students’ thinking moving from specific to the abstract and then back again.
Read my principles of differentiation to understand the thoughts behind these techniques.