A go-to activity to introduce the prompts of depth and complexity to students while they also introduce themselves to their new classmates.
All Of MyExamples
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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.
🔃 Think Big! But Also Small.
Get your students' thinking moving from specific to the abstract and then back again.
🪄 Change, Then Explain!
My favorite way to reach "synthesize" - ask students to make a change and then explain the effects of that change.
🐛 Fuzzy Problems
Fuzzy problems are ambiguous. They are missing data. They have lots of right answers, but (more importantly) they also have wrong answers.
🚫 Anti-Techniques
These are ideas I used to believe that now I think aren't actually so great. Oops!
💥 Get Ridiculous
Avoid boring examples and go for the outliers! Everything's more interesting when you're working with unexpected examples.
❓ Ask Better Questions
I received surprisingly little training on how to ask questions, considering how many darn questions I asked!
🎥 Embed A Classic
Take out a boring sample and embed great art, music, film, tv shows, and other classics into your lessons.
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All Of My Examples
Climbing Blooms With A Science Lesson
How I’d push a mere science demonstration to higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Free Verse from A Particular Point of View
My go-to writing task is a free verse poem written from a particular perspective. I learned this idea from my boss, Sandi, who learned it from Joan Franklin Smutny (I think!). You can use ANYTHING as your prompt. A piece of art works well to introduce the idea, but you can move to writing once […]
Upgrading A Research Report
So many “research reports” are really just “regurgitation re-writes.” Here’s one way to take a research report to a much more interesting level.
Create A Civilization: The Flag
Let’s design a flag for your students’ civilizations. But let’s do it right! We’ll dig into the language of vexillology, analyze real flags, form some opinions, and only then create our own flag.
Create A Civilization: Pick The Location
As we begin the project, students first consider where on earth their civilization will begin.
Create A Civilization: From Hunters and Gatherers to Farmers
Now, let’s see how your students’ civilization transitions from hunters to gatherers.
Create A Civilization: The River
Most humans want to live near fresh water, which means that most civilizations settled near a river! Let’s add a river to your students’ civilizations.
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!
A Tessellation Art (and Math) Project
Let’s create an MC Escher-style tessellation art (and math) project with nothing more than an index card, a marker, and paper.