Going Beyond “Define These Terms In Your Own Words” "Define these terms in your own words" may contain depth and complexity… but it's neither deep nor complex!
Sharpening Questions With some small changes, we can turn fluffy opinion questions into thought-provoking evaluation questions.
Graphic Organizers Are Not Final Products Ending with a Venn Diagram is like comparing two vacation spots… but never actually going on the vacation!
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.
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.
Focus on Thinking, Not the Product 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.
Four Types of Questions You Can Ask Asking questions is such a basic tool of teaching, yet how many of us have ever been taught to ask good questions? In this opening to a series about questioning, we'll explore how to get students asking each other questions.
Depth and Complexity: The Icons, the Framework, and How to Actually Use Them My biggest problem when implementing Depth and Complexity? I used them in a shallow and simple way!
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.
Matching Flowers and Pollinators How to add a couple of Analyze-level tasks to this Synthesize activity.
