Depth or Complexity Needs Bloom’s Taxonomy

For years, I made a very common mistake with Depth and Complexity. I plugged the icons into low-level questions. I should have focused on Bloom’s Taxonomy first, and then added Depth and Complexity.

Depth & Complexity Is Just The Seasoning

To use a cooking analogy, Depth and Complexity are the spices I add as I’m cooking. They enhance the meal.

But they aren’t the meal!

Bloom’s Taxonomy is the main course. If I start with a low-level question, adding Depth and Complexity doesn’t change that.

Still Stuck at “Identify”

Depth and Complexity focuses students on one aspect of the content. It asks a more specific question. But it doesn’t change the level of thinking.

Initial question: Identify the main character.
Question with D&C: Identify three 🌻 details about the main character.

Focus On Bloom’s

Here’s how adjusting Bloom’s Taxonomy would affect that question. Note that I have to ask multiple, sequenced questions to best use Bloom’s:

Initial question: Identify the main character.
Question with D&C: Identify three 🌻 details about the main character.
Focus on Blooms:
1. Which character from another story is most similar to this character? Note the 🌻 details that make them similar.
2. Which of these 🌻 details is most different about the two characters?
3. Write from each characters’ 👓 perspective. How do they each see that detail differently?

Depth and Complexity adds a nice kick, but Bloom’s Taxonomy is doing the bulk of the work.

Thinking vs Content

This is the key to using Depth and Complexity: D&C differentiates content, but not thinking.

Depth and Complexity can take our content from “main character” to “details about the main character” or “main character’s perspective” – but the thinking verb is still Identify. We are still at the lowest level.

So a mentor recommended I always start by planning for students’ thinking:

“How do we want students to think about X?”

Even the most advanced-sounding content can be ruined by low-level questions. I can get deeper thinking from Dr. Seuss than Shakespeare!

Shakespeare sounds like advanced content. But I can ask a low-level question, like: “List three 🌼 important details’ in Romeo and Juliet.”
Dr. Seuss seems like basic content. But I could ask: “Consider The Cat In The Hat and Green Eggs and Ham. ⚖️ In which story is Power used more dangerously?”

Do you see how important the thinking is?

Climb and Combine

So we want to climb Bloom’s Taxonomy through a series of questions. As we do that, we combine with the most appropriate prompt of Depth and Complexity.

Here’s an example:

Look for patterns in a character’s actions.
Compare the patterns in this character’s actions with another character’s.
Judge the ethics of the patterns we see in this character’s actions.
Develop a new situation that would continue this pattern.

At each step, students are forced to think deeper about the patterns they’ve uncovered. They’re no longer just “identifying.”

And notice how each step easily leads to a larger, more complex product.

At level one, a student could just write a sentence, but after that, the responses need to be bigger. Perhaps by the end, students are debating and creating skits.

An Interactive Version

Many years ago, I created The Differentiator, an interactive tool based on these ideas to help you modify the parts of a differentiated objective. Play around with it to see what a big difference the thinking skill can make!