My kid and I just read A Wrinkle In Time. Well, I read it to him. And he’s six, so we used the graphic novel. At the end of this version, there is a page of Discussion Questions. See how many of our recurring questioning problems you spot: The Nine Questions Since the photo is […]
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Browse By Technique
Hundreds of example lessons organized by differentiation techniques. Or browse by content area below!
💥 Get Ridiculous
Avoid boring examples and go for the outliers! Everything's more interesting when you're working with unexpected examples.
🚫 Anti-Techniques
These are ideas I used to believe that now I think aren't actually so great. Oops!
🤭 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.
❓ Ask Better Questions
I received surprisingly little training on how to ask questions, considering how many darn questions I asked!
🐛 Fuzzy Problems
Fuzzy problems are ambiguous. They are missing data. They have lots of right answers, but (more importantly) they also have wrong answers.
🪄 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.
Browse By Content Area
All Of My Examples
Taking A Zoologist Across Disciplines
All I did was ask students to list and explain three “disciplines.” Let’s take it a bit further!
Two Questions I Won’t Ask About A Famous Quote
As a new teacher, I’d often present a famous quotation to students. Something like: Neither a borrower not a lender be. ~ Benjamin Franklin Then, I had two questions I might ask: What do you think Ben Franklin meant by this? What does this mean to you? Neither question is very good! I regret using […]
What Makes An Antagonist Effective?
A teacher sent in a sequence of questions they had developed. Who is the primary antagonist in your novel? What makes this antagonist effective? How does the antagonist cause problems for the protagonist/other characters? What antagonist from another story, movie, or game is similar? If you could give the protagonist one gift to help him […]
Going Beyond “Define These Terms In Your Own Words”
Let’s just look at a typical 👄 Language of the Discipline question on my old Depth and Complexity worksheets. Define these terms in your own words: Union, Confederacy, abolition, secession, emancipation, and blockade. So I was just stopping at “define the words.” That’s a BOB task (Bottom of Blooms). It’s an okay place to start, […]
My Unreadable Question About Multiple Perspectives
Yes, I actually gave my students this question: “How could two experts’ 👓 perspectives regarding information from this reading selection differ from one another?” yikes.
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 […]