Every lesson needs an objective and every objective should have four clear parts:
- Thinking Skill: The verb – what students will be doing with their brains (⚠️ this is very often left out, but is the most important piece!)
- Content: The content – what students will be learning (often comes from your standards).
- Resource(s): Where students will get information.
- Product: The result – what students will make to show their learning off (this is often way over-emphasized)
I learned this from my master teacher (the great Nanci Cole) who probably learned it from Sandra Kaplan and Bette Gould.
Shortcut: I created The Differentiator to help you develop differentiated objectives. But you’ll understand it much better if you read this whole article.
The Thinking Skill
The thinking skill represents what students’ brains Will be doing. Use good ol’ Bloom’s Taxonomy to find your level.
Are students memorizing (I hope that’s not all they’ll be doing!)? Are they making categories? Comparing and contrasting? Picking the “best” using criteria? Developing a new idea? These are all different thinking skills.
The thinking skill is the core of the objective and it is the perfect place to pump up low-level lessons.
⚠️ Beware these common problems in which low-level thinking masquerades as high-level thinking:
- “Create a list of the 50 states” is at the bottom of Bloom’s despite having that fancy-looking word “create” in it.
- “Understand” and “know” are horribly vague and often mask mere memory lessons. Start with something more specific.
- “Research” often means “reword existing knowledge” which is also at the bottom of Bloom’s.
Content
The content is what students are learning about. Typically, this comes from your standards.
You might wonder:
“But if I have to teach my 5th grade standards, how can I possibly differentiate the content?”
This is where the prompts of Depth and Complexity come in. They help us to go deeper into more specific bits of your content. Students still work with the same content, but you take those who are ready much further:
- Rather than thinking about just Paul Revere, students could ponder “The 🚦 rules Paul Revere followed” or “Paul Revere’s ⚖️ ethical decisions.”
- Instead of just considering triangles, students could analyze patterns in triangles or rules that triangles must follow.
- Go beyond learning about “the planets,” but consider how our understand of planets has ⏳ changed over time or how different people have 👓different points of view of each planet.
Depth and Complexity will help you to focus students’ thinking more deeply on a specific part of your content.
This helps remind me that, in order to go deeper, we have to get more specific. We can’t ask kids to think both broadly and deeply at the same time.
Intermission: Combining Thinking Skills and Content
Ok, let’s look at how we can differentiate an objective by playing with both the Thinking Skill and the Content.
We begin with a lesson objective for 6th-grade social studies in California built from a Thinking Skill and Content:
“Students will list three tools early humans used to survive…”
- Thinking Skill: list
- Content: tools of early humans
That objective has a low-level thinking skill: listing. Let’s pump up this objective by raising the thinking skill using Bloom’s:
“Students will judge the three most important tools of early humans…”
- Thinking Skill: judge importance
- Content: tools of early humans
Another option:
“Students will compare and contrast tools from early humans in China, Rome, and India…”
- Thinking Skill: compare and contrast (analyze)
- Content: tools of early humans from three civilizations
Now our students are at the analyze level of Bloom’s and we’ve embedded the depth and complexity prompt of Multiple Perspectives by noting specific groups of people.
Scaffold Higher Level Thinking
The higher you climb Blooms, the more important it is to create a sequence of objectives to scaffold the task. Here’s a ladder of Bloom’s I might have students climb:
- List five tools used by early humans in China, Rome, and India.
- Compare and contrast the tools across different civilizations. Identify three patterns.
- Choose the most important tool from each place. Explain your reasoning.
- Create a similar tool that a new civilization might have used. Explain why it would have been essential for those people.
Rather than starting at “create,” I’ve built out several steps to help students be more successful. This is an example of “Low Floors, High Ceilings.”
Differentiate Resources
Hopefully, it’s obvious that your kids are going to need better resources as we demand higher levels of thinking. In your objective, decide what you’ll offer. Provide a wide range of resources to enable students to go deeper. Rather than chapter one, lesson one, consider offering:
- encyclopedias
- newspapers
- magazines
- internet sources
- expert interviews
- alternate textbooks
- non-fiction sources
- maps
- art
Now our objective grows to be:
Students will compare and contrast tools from early humans in China, Rome, and India using their textbook, a list of websites found on the board, and a video embedded on the class website.
- Thinking Skill: compare and contrast
- Content: tools of early humans from three civilizations
- Resources: textbook, list of websites, a video
When we differentiate the resources, we’re providing the raw materials for students’ brains to process. When we climb Bloom’s, we also need to provide better resources.
Differentiating the Product
Finally, you can differentiate the product. This is what students will make to show that they’ve done the thinking we asked from them.
The product can also a place to introduce choice. Taking our original objective and offering three different product choices can spice things up for our students:
Students will compare and contrast tools from early humans in China, Rome, and India using their textbook, a list of websites found on the board, and a video embedded on the class website. They may create a presentation, an advertisement, or a mini-encyclopedia.”
- Thinking Skill: compare and contrast
- Content: tools of early humans from three civilizations
- Resources: textbook, list of websites, a video
- Products: presentation, advertisement, mini-encyclopedia
My pal David Chung offers a great menu of products on his class website (pdf).
Note: You’ll need to be clear about how a product will demonstrate the learning you expect from students. I always model a product first, usually creating an example as well as a low-quality non-example.
Don’t just say “create a presentation” and then be surprised when those presentations stink. Products need to be taught.
Note 2: Graphic organizers can be a great way to organize thinking, but I don’t think they should be a final product.
Electronic Version: The Differentiator
Based on these ideas, I created The Differentiator to help you quickly and easily develop differentiated objectives based on these four levers.
When to Differentiate Objectives
- When teaching the whole group, use these ideas to create a more rigorous lesson for your classroom.
- When developing flexible groups, use these ideas to create levels of rigor for students with different needs.
- When planning for students with multiple exceptionalities, differentiate their objective to meet their individualized goals.
- Offer your whole group choice from three versions of an objective and allow them to self-differentiate. The results may be interesting.