A Tessellation Art (and Math) Project Let's create an MC Escher-style tessellation art (and math) project with nothing more than an index card, a marker, and paper.
Matching Flowers and Pollinators How to add a couple of Analyze-level tasks to this Synthesize activity.
Graphic Organizers Are Not Final Products Ending with a Venn Diagram is like comparing two vacation spots… but never actually going on the vacation!
“Engagement” isn’t BAD, but… "Engagement" is a nice by-product of a well-designed lesson, but it sure isn't our actual goal as educators.
Creating Seemingly Unrelated Analogies Want to encourage students to find unexpected connections across content? Here's a quick framework based on the most important terms from both bits of content.
How To Introduce the Depth and Complexity Icons My biggest problem when implementing Depth and Complexity? I used them in a shallow and simple way!
Ask Sequences, Never One-Off Questions Beware one-off questions. Any question that we prepare should have a natural follow-up question. And those follow-ups should push students up Bloom’s Taxonomy.
How long should we wait after asking a question? I might ask the best questions in the world, but if I don't give students even three seconds to think, those questions aren't doing their job. Here's what we know about Wait Time.
Help my students remember these confusing terms! If you want students to memorize, you can't aim for memorize. You have to aim higher – and then memorization comes along for free.
Make A *Better* Calendar! The calendar is a source of fantastic factoring problems with many social studies add-ons. Why 12 months? Why 30 (or 31 or 28) days? Why are weeks 7 days long? Why don't they fit into the months (or the year!)? Why did we do this to ourselves!?
