These eleven thinking tools will give your students practical ways to think more deeply about a topic.
The dimensions of depth and complexity are a great first step towards a classroom differentiated for gifted learners. Learn the basics of these thinking tools and begin incorporating them into your lessons tomorrow!
While the official depth and complexity icons look great, they lead to all kinds of problems in the digital world and also take ownership away from students. Emoji are an elegant solution to both problems.
Here's the most common mistake I've seen in implementing depth and complexity: the "fill in the blanks" worksheet.
You can use the prompts of depth and complexity yet still ask very shallow questions. Here's how to avoid this common pitfall…
Earlier in this series, you met the eleven dimensions of depth and complexity. Today you'll be introduced to another set of rigor-increasing, engagement-enhancing thinking tools known as the content imperatives.
Frames, a graphic organizer often used with the Depth and Complexity framework, have one big trap that I fell into for years.
The Across Disciplines prompt asks students to note how the topic they’re studying intersects with other fields as well as with other topics within the same field. Across Your unit on Weather has natural connections to social studies, language arts, and math. 📚 Across Disciplines reminds us to think broadly and note that weather has […]
The Depth and Complexity thinking tool ⏳ Change Over Time does exactly what it sounds like: gets students looking at a topic across multiple time periods. I love to introduce this with old photos of Mickey Mouse, McDonald’s storefronts, and (of course) pictures of me growing up. However, don’t keep this prompt at the surface-level. […]
While the official depth and complexity icons look great, they lead to all kinds of problems in the digital world and also take ownership away from students. Emoji are an elegant solution to both problems.
By far, ❓Unanswered Questions was the prompt that I under-utilized with my own class. Now I see it in a whole new light, and boy is there immense power in prompting students to note and explore truly unanswered questions.
Language of the Discipline is more than just slapping an icon next to an existing spelling list. It’s about digging into the words, phrases, symbols, and acronyms that an expert uses to discuss their field efficiently.
In this section, we introduce two more prompts of depth and complexity: ⚖️ ethics and 👓 multiple perspectives.
In this section, we’ll learn about two more prompts of Depth and Complexity that pair beautifully: Rules and Patterns. Because they share some similarities, I like to introduce them together and lean heavily on what makes Rules and Patterns different.
When introducing the prompts of Depth and Complexity, I like to begin with Big Idea and Details. Here are some ways you could get started with these two thinking tools.
The Ethics prompt of depth and complexity fits so easily into the humanities… but what about ethics in math?