All Of MyExamples

Browse By Technique

Example lessons organized by differentiation techniques.

🪄 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.

💥 Get Ridiculous

Avoid boring examples and go for the outliers! Everything's more interesting when you're working with unexpected examples.

🔬 Get Specific with Criteria

Move from fluffy opinion questions towards brain-sweating evaluation questions by adding specific criteria.

🎥 Embed A Classic

Take out a boring sample and embed great art, music, film, tv shows, and other classics into your lessons.

🤭 Find The Controversy

Every topic has some juicy controversy. Leverage it! Look for ambiguity, disagreements, dilemmas, and discrepancies in any topic.

🌈 The Spectrum Of Abstraction

Too many lessons stay at one level of abstraction. Instead, move from specific examples to a big broad idea. Or go in the other direction. The key is to move!

🚫 Anti-Techniques

These are ideas I used to believe that now I think aren't actually so great. Oops!

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.

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.

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).

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.

Remix the Song “Help!”

Students took the classic song, Help!, and rewrote it to be about their collective summers.

Could we fit 1,000 kids on the playground? 10,000?

If your students can find the area of a square then, armed with Google Earth, they can also figure out how many students you could pack into your school’s playground.

Concept Formation: A Model for Inductive Thinking

Here’s are the steps for running an inductive lesson based on Hilda Taba’s model of Concept Formation. Plus a sample lesson about the Nile River.

The Marshmallow Challenge

A fantastic fuzzy problem to start the year. Students use pasta and tape to try to get a marshmallow up as high as possible.

Fizz Buzz – A Divisibility Game

Here’s a quick to learn but difficult to master math game. Start with some basic divisibility rules, but then feel free to extend it to any math topic.