A go-to activity to introduce the prompts of depth and complexity to students while they also introduce themselves to their new classmates.
Content Area: Cross Curricular
Create A Civilization: The River
Most humans want to live near fresh water, which means that most civilizations settled near a river! Let’s add a river to your students’ civilizations.
Curiosity Skill: Encouraging Students to Ask Other Students
If you want to make a massive change in the culture of your classroom, move from teachers asking students all of the questions to students asking each other questions!
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.
Concentric Circles – Getting Students to Think Bigger (and Smaller!)
This differentiation technique is called “Concentric Circles”. You use it to move students up and down the ladder of abstraction, applying a single idea in multiple contexts.
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.
From “Summarize” to “Synthesize”
Even what seems like a low-level “summarize” task can become beautifully high-level when we climb Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Don’t Jump Straight to “Create”!
When we jump from “this kid likes board games” straight to “I’ll have them create a new board game”, we leave out important steps in the creative process and set kids up for disappointment (and end up with a lot of unfinished projects). Here’s how to scaffold a truly creative task.
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.
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.