So, how do we start writing differentiated lessons? These are a handful of my go-to techniques for designing a lesson that goes beyond the grade-level standard and gets kids thinking!.
❓ 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.
🤭 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.
💥 Get Ridiculous
Avoid boring examples and go for the outliers! Everything's more interesting when you're working with unexpected examples.
🪄 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.
🚫 Anti-Techniques
These are ideas I used to believe that now I think aren't actually so great. Oops!
← Think Bigger: Read my principles of differentiation to understand the thoughts behind these techniques.