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!
All Of MyExamples
Browse By Technique
Example lessons organized by differentiation techniques.
🎥 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.
🐛 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!
🤭 Find The Controversy
Every topic has some juicy controversy. Leverage it! Look for ambiguity, disagreements, dilemmas, and discrepancies in any topic.
💥 Get Ridiculous
Avoid boring examples and go for the outliers! Everything's more interesting when you're working with unexpected examples.
🔃 Think Big! But Also Small.
Get your students' thinking moving from specific to the abstract and then back again.
Browse By Content Area
All Of My Examples
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.
Math Game: Heaps
Heaps is a lovely math-y strategy game that requires no more than paper and pencil to play.
Writing in Pi-lish
Here’s the perfect constraint for March! Writing with the digits of Pi.
Concentric Circles – Getting Students to Think Bigger (and Smaller!)
This differentiation technique is called “Concentric Circles”. You use it to move students up and down the ladder of abstraction, applying a single idea in multiple contexts.
How long should we wait after asking a question?
I might ask the best questions in the world, but if I don’t give students even three seconds to think, those questions aren’t doing their job. Here’s what we know about Wait Time.
Analyzing Prefixes and Suffixes
Instead of just memorizing what a bunch of morphemes mean, we’re looking broadly, exploring patterns, finding unexpected similarities and weird differences.
From “Summarize” to “Synthesize”
Even what seems like a low-level “summarize” task can become beautifully high-level when we climb Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Thinking Like Producers About Consumers
Here’s how I’d use ethics and multiple perspectives to get students thinking about producers, consumers, and decomposers in new and interesting ways.
Don’t Jump Straight to “Create”!
When we jump from “this kid likes board games” straight to “I’ll have them create a new board game”, we leave out important steps in the creative process and set kids up for disappointment (and end up with a lot of unfinished projects). Here’s how to scaffold a truly creative task.
Just How Much Pasta Could I Cook…
So, just how much pasta could I cook in an Olympic-sized pool?
Rewrite It, But Don’t Use “E”
Here’s an interesting way to move students past mundane patterns in their writing. Ask for a rewrite, but without a letter (or two).
Never Ask One-Off Questions
Beware one-off questions. Any question that we prepare should have a natural follow-up question. And those follow-ups should push students up Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Using Art to Practice Reading
When you’re teaching a reading skill, can you replace some of those dull sample texts with glorious artwork?
Making Punctuation Interesting
How can we move a punctuation lesson beyond mere memorization and towards interesting thinking?
So… which is longer: a Ray, a Line, or a Line Segment?
Let’s move beyond memorizing definitions and get kids grappling with the fascinating concept of infinity!
Use Universal Themes to Make Fractions Interesting
What if we used a universal theme to guide our study of fractions? These very big ideas get students thinking about fractions in a new way.
Using a Classic in Math!?
According to Costello, 7 × 13 = 28. In fact, watch him prove it…
Combining Depth and Complexity Prompts into a Generalization
Let’s start with a puzzlement, ask kids to generate an abstract statement, and then find evidence that their statement works across several different areas.
Direct Instruction: A Model For Learning A Skill
Direct Instruction is the model to use when we want to teach students to perform a specific skill. It gently moves from teacher modeling to independent student practice.
Inquiry Training: A Model To Teach Good Questioning
Inquiry Training is a model of instruction that looks a lot like 20 Questions. You’ll teach your students to ask more helpful questions and to avoid rushing to a hypothesis too quickly.
Scholar’s Cafe
Get students moving, thinking, writing, and reading each others’ ideas with a Scholar’s Cafe.
A Classic: “Who’s On First” and 21st Century Kids
My 21st century 12-year-olds absolutely died watching Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s On First” skit. And we got a great homophone activity out of it too.
Add Criteria to Improve “Evaluate” Questions
With some small changes, we can turn fluffy opinion questions into thought-provoking evaluation questions.
Remix the Song “Help!”
Students took the classic song, Help!, and rewrote it to be about their collective summers.