Here’s a Depth and Complexity worksheet that is not very deep at all! A common problem with any Frame worksheet is that the four sections are unrelated to each other. There are four one-off questions rather than a sequence of questions. I think any question should be part of a sequence (this is how you […]
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Hundreds of example lessons organized by differentiation techniques. Or browse by content area below!
🤭 Find The Controversy
Every topic has some juicy controversy. Leverage it! Look for ambiguity, disagreements, dilemmas, and discrepancies in any topic.
🎥 Embed A Classic
Take out a boring sample and embed great art, music, film, tv shows, and other classics into your lessons.
🚫 Anti-Techniques
These are ideas I used to believe that now I think aren't actually so great. Oops!
🪄 Change, Then Explain!
My favorite way to reach "synthesize" - ask students to make a change and then explain the effects of that change.
🔃 Think Big! But Also Small.
Get your students' thinking moving from specific to the abstract and then back again.
🐛 Fuzzy Problems
Fuzzy problems are ambiguous. They are missing data. They have lots of right answers, but (more importantly) they also have wrong answers.
❓ Ask Better Questions
I received surprisingly little training on how to ask questions, considering how many darn questions I asked!
💥 Get Ridiculous
Avoid boring examples and go for the outliers! Everything's more interesting when you're working with unexpected examples.
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All Of My Examples
My Unreadable Question About Multiple Perspectives
As I browse my old worksheets for Depth and Complexity questions, this one really popped out. How could two experts’ 👓 perspectives regarding information from this reading selection differ from one another? Yikes. This looks like my college essays where I’d try to stretch every sentence to reach the minimum word count 😆 Clear It […]
Beyond “Describe How This Changed Over Time”
Here’s a task that I dug off of an old laptop: Describe a character or situation that ⏳ changed over time. Give examples from the story to prove it. Yeah. There’s a lot of work to be done here! Edit for Clarity First, the question is just poorly written. It’s a rough draft. When I […]
A Depth and Complexity ELA Worksheet with Problems
Here’s a Depth and Complexity worksheet I used to use with my students: I look at it now and shudder. I was making so many mistakes here. Let’s just zoom out and imagine that I asked the same questions at a book club with fellow adults. Me: What is this story’s main theme? Him: Oh, […]
Don’t Just List Ethical Issues
Here’s an example of a question I asked my students: ⚖️ What moral or ethical issues are raised in this book? What controversies exist? Now, the first problem is that this question is way too wordy. I often gave my class rough drafts of questions. Nowadays, I want to make sure to proofread, revise, and […]
Going Beyond “Identify a Story’s Problem”
Here is an embarrassingly low-level pair of questions I asked my students: What was the problem in this story? How was the problem solved? Now, it is technically a sequence of questions. But my students are stuck at the lowest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. I’m going to get the same responses from even my most […]
Improving “What’s The Chapter’s 🏛️ Big Idea?”
Here’s a Depth and Complexity question I found on an old worksheet: What title would you give this chapter? Explain why your title fits the chapter’s 🏛️ Big Idea. Sure, I’m using Depth and Complexity. But how am I asking students to think? Bloom’s Taxonomy is much more important than Depth and Complexity. (And it’s not […]
Fixing my “Think Like A Statistician” Frame
I used a Depth and Complexity Frame like this with my math students. Let’s look at how we could improve this. Some problems: It asks four unrelated questions. I want to build a sequence of questions that climbs Bloom’s Taxonomy. Most of the questions are naturally answered with “yes” or “no” or a list. Questions […]
Matching Flowers and Pollinators
How to add a couple of Analyze-level tasks to this Synthesize activity.
Don’t Just Paraphrase A Poem
I asked my students to read a poem. Then they had to: Paraphrase each line of the poem. Write your version next to the original line So, I’m not going to get into the pointlessness of this task. I had a room of the most brilliant 6th graders in town and this is what we […]