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All AboutDepth And Complexity

This framework for differentiation will give your students practical ways to think more deeply about a topic.

Featured Articles

Depth and Complexity Icons: Everything You Need to Know!

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!

Emoji as Digital Depth and Complexity Icons

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.

Depth or Complexity Alone Isn’t Deep Enough

You can use the prompts of depth and complexity yet still ask very shallow questions. Here's how to avoid this common pitfall…

Other Depth and Complexity Articles

Use Universal Themes to Make Fractions Interesting

What if we used a universal theme to guide our study of fractions? These very big ideas get students thinking about fractions in a new way.

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.

How To Introduce the Depth and Complexity Icons to Students

Here are a few ways that you can introduce the prompts of Depth and Complexity to a range of students (yes, even kindergartners!).

Making Our Own Depth and Complexity Icon Posters (That Emphasize Thinking)

Why I let students make their own depth and complexity posters rather than buying and displaying professional printable posters.

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.

Thinking Like Equivalent Fractions

Go across disciplines by asking students to write a story about fraction equivalence.

My Big Mistake with Frames and Depth and Complexity

Frames, a graphic organizer often used with the Depth and Complexity framework, have one big trap that I fell into for years.

Depth and Complexity: 📚Across Disciplines

The Across Disciplines prompt asks students to think about how this topic intersects with other fields as well as with other topics within the same field.

Depth and Complexity: ⏳Change Over Time

It’s quite easy to “use” Depth and Complexity and yet have low-level thinking at the same time. Here’s why it’s so important to make sure that our use of Depth and Complexity is truly changing students’ thinking.

Depth and Complexity: ❓Unanswered Questions

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.

Depth and Complexity: 👄Language of the Discipline

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.

Depth and Complexity: ⚖️ Ethics and 👓 Multiple Perspectives

In this section, we introduce two more prompts of depth and complexity: ⚖️ ethics and 👓 multiple perspectives.

Depth and Complexity: 🌀Patterns and 🚦Rules

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.

Depth and Complexity: 🏛️Big Idea and 🌻Details

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.

Depth and Complexity: Ethics… In Math!?

The Ethics prompt of depth and complexity fits so easily into the humanities… but what about ethics in math?!

Misconceptions About The 🏛️Big Idea

Big Idea is often the first prompt of Depth and Complexity that I introduce to students. That does not mean, however, that it is basic or less sophisticated than the other prompts.

When Too Much “Depth” Leads To Simplicity

Here’s the most common mistake I’ve seen in implementing depth and complexity: the “fill in the blanks” worksheet.

The Least Popular Depth and Complexity Prompt

Last month, I asked which prompt of Depth and Complexity you’d get rid of. The results were pretty unanimous…

Building Sequences of Questions with Depth and Complexity

Understanding how to move students from abstract to specific and back again is a key to differentiating for the gifted. Reading through a pal’s dissertation gave me a new way of applying this to Depth and Complexity…

Depth, Complexity, and Graphic Organizers

Layer the prompts of Depth and Complexity onto any graphic organizer to increase the level of thinking required of your students.

What is up with those “New” Depth and Complexity Icons!?

I love the prompts of depth and complexity and the content imperatives. But some teachers are being asked to use eight new prompts that just aren’t as good as the classics.

Multiple Perspectives: Right And Wrong At The Same Time?

It’s essential to teach our students to think flexibly and consider multiple points of view. Flexible thinking leads to product innovation, diplomacy between nations, and advances in science. School, however, often encourages students to settle into a “one right answer” mindset.

3 Examples to Introduce ⏳ Change Over Time

Here are three visual resources to discuss change over time, compare and contrast, and multiple persepctives: beauty tips from 1889, company logos over time, and 1950s 7up ads featuring babies.

Think Like A Philosopher

Up near the top of Bloom’s taxonomy is “evaluating.” A great use of this level of thinking is to evaluate a character’s ethical choice. But we can go deeper! Let’s ask students to evaluate characters’ actions based on another character’s point of view. To add another layer, we’ll teach kids about philosophers and use their points of view as well.

Think Like An Engineer: Egg Drop

At our school, 6th graders participate in an annual egg drop. To increase the rigor, I looked for unique scientific roles and came up with three: designing a parachute to slow the egg’s descent, testing materials to pack inside the structure, and developing the structure itself. Each of these roles will be developed into a scientific discipline.

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