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.
Graphic Organizers Are Not Final Products Ending with a Venn Diagram is like comparing two vacation spots… but never actually going on the vacation!
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.
Introducing Universal Themes and Generalizations Generalizations, big ideas, abstractions, universal themes... they are designed to help our gifted students learn. However, what I didn't realize was that they would help me teach!
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.
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.
Introducing Ourselves With Depth and Complexity and Frames A go-to activity to introduce the prompts of depth and complexity to students while they also introduce themselves to their new classmates.
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!
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.
