Paradox: Ship of Theseus Here's a fun thought experiment your students are sure to get a kick out of: when something is slowly replaced over time, is it still the same thing in the end?
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.
Evaluate with Academic Tournaments The bracketed tournament isn't just for college basketball. Set up a tournament to determine best president, state, element, or literary character and challenge your students to make interesting judgements.
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!
Create A Holiday Take students beyond the decorations and ask them to identify what a holiday reveals about a culture's values. Then, push them further as they develop their own holidays.
Running A Curiosity Project Merlin Mann stated that employees’ motivation increases when they get to “build a robot” once in a while. That is, do something creative beyond regular work. Can we do this at school? Offices have “casual Fridays,” can we have “curiosity Fridays?"
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.
Thinking From Anything’s Perspective How a small change, with very little effort on the teacher's part, leads to a delightfully complex task that can will get students thinking.
Classic Paintings for your Classroom Exposing students to great pieces of art is an easy way to enhance a lesson, provide a visual way to practice a skill, and educate our students beyond the prescribed curriculum. Here's a list of works that you can easily grab and use in your class.
Which One is Not Like The Others? When we ask kids "which one is not like the others", our cleverest students love to find ways to pick the non-obvious answer. So why not use this as a framework for pushing students deeper into our content.
