When I was a new teacher, you would have seen some pretty fancy products hanging in my room, but if you stopped to consider how my kids thought about the content… well, often my students just restated facts that I had already told them.
All AboutDifferentiating
When we differentiate, we simply offer students opportunities to think at a level appropriate to their ability - not their age nor their grade level.
Scholar’s Cafe
Get students moving, thinking, writing, and reading each others’ ideas with a Scholar’s Cafe.
Remix the Song “Help!”
Students took the classic song, Help!, and rewrote it to be about their collective summers.
Embed A Classic
An easy way to spice up any lesson is to remove the god-awful samples and replace them with selections from great works of art, music, film, tv shows, and historic moments. You get the added bonus of exposing students to new ideas.
Concept Formation: A Model for Inductive Thinking
Here’s are the steps for running an inductive lesson based on Hilda Taba’s model of Concept Formation. Plus a sample lesson about the Nile River.
Synthesize: Make A Change, Explain The Effect
I love the term “Synthesize” from the classic Bloom’s Taxonomy, but it can be hard to know exactly what it looks like. My favorite “Synthesize Recipe” is to ask students to make a change to existing content and then explain the effects of that change to me.
Get Ridiculous!
One technique for finding complexity in a topic is to look for the edge cases, the outliers, the really big or small versions.
Why My Toddler Likes Lego, Not Duplo
Even though he’s in the Duplo age range, my kid is simply more interested in Lego. And it’s always more effective, more respectful, and simply easier to start with a kid’s interests rather than what’s “age-appropriate.”
Students Need More Than Independent Work
It’s so easy to just ask advanced students to work by themselves in a corner. But, the more advanced the kid, the more they need advanced instruction and adult guidance.
The Coloring Problem
How few colors can you use to fill in a map so that no neighboring regions are the same color?