Depth or Complexity Alone Isn’t Deep Enough

The prompts of depth and complexity are an incredible tool to begin differentiating learning objectives.

Teachers can quickly modify a lesson’s goal to increase the challenge by plugging in the depth and complexity prompts. But, I frequently see the prompts used at a mere surface level in classrooms.

🚨 Depth and Complexity won’t do anything meaningful if we’re asking low-level questions to start with 🚨

Beyond Just Depth & Complexity

Sure, you can drop “patterns” into an objective to raise the level of the content, like so:

• Before: “Look for a character’s actions”
• After: “Look for the patterns in a character’s actions.”

Note, however, that the thinking skill is unchanged. Students are still “looking for.” On Bloom’s Taxonomy, that’s “identify” — a very low-order thinking skill. When we use depth and complexity we can’t neglect the thinking skill.

It’s Not Your Fault

If you suddenly realize that you’re using depth and complexity with a very low level of thinking, it’s not really your fault. Almost every example of Depth and Complexity you’ll find online uses the bottom of Bloom’s. Look at any of these charts, and you’ll note that each question begins with “what.”

Content vs Thinking

When planning a lesson, we have to not just differentiate content (which is what the prompts of depth and complexity do), but also adjust the thinking that we expect students to do.

A Shakespeare play is content. And it seems like pretty advanced content — unless you’re asking something like this:

List the main characters’ names in Romeo and Juliet.

That’s bottom-of-the-barrel Blooms. Remember or identify. You can add all of the depth and complexity you want, but you’re still asking a low-level question.

Meanwhile, Dr. Seuss seems like basic content — unless you’re asking students something like this:

“Evaluate the ethical use of power in The Cat In The Hat and compare it to the use of power in Green Eggs and Ham. In which story is power used more dangerously?”

Here, despite the seemingly low level of content (Dr. Seuss), we’ve pumped up both the content (by making it about the ethical use of power) and the thinking (evaluate; compare and contrast) so that it’s actually a pretty interesting question even for older students.

When writing an objective, we must increase the complexity of not just the content, but also the thinking skill.

Climb The Taxonomy

Instead of just asking kids to “identify” over and over, climb Bloom’s Taxonomy in combination with a prompt of depth and complexity. Here’s an example:

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

At each step, students are forced to think harder 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!