Get Students Out Of Creative Ruts Sometimes students need a little structure to force them into a more creative state of mind. Here are a few ideas for interesting writing prompts
Introducing “Criteria” To Students Teaching our students to identify the criteria behind a decision will make them better decision makers and help them understand others' points of views.
Create Your Own Civilization Project Each year, my students created their own civilization to mirror what we were learning about Rome, China, India, and beyond.
From Silent Reading To Creating Art I've been continuing the idea to explore classic music during silent reaing, and incorporated Gustav Holsts' "The Planets." My students, who have an affinity for memorizing gods and goddesses, took a special interest in this idea. I figured, let's see how far their interests will take us?
Thinking Hats and Lunar Survival Skills How Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats helped me solve a problem with my favorite group discussion task.
Ask Them Which Is Better Moving from analysis to evaluation sure makes things more fun. Why? Check out these examples. Which would you rather answer?
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.
Synthesize: Make A Change, Explain The Effect I love the term "Synthesize" from the classic Bloom's Taxonomy, but it can be hard to know exactly what it looks like. My favorite "Synthesize Recipe" is to ask students to make a change to existing content and then explain the effects of that change to me.
Divergent Questions (How To Ask ‘Em) How to ask Divergent Questions and ensure that your students are thinking rather than merely remembering.
Why I don’t include “Explain Why” in Questions I used to think that adding "explain why" to the end of a question somehow made it higher-level. But now I see two problems in asking students to "explain their thinking".
