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Differentiation Techniques

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!.

🌈 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!

💥 Get Ridiculous

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

🐛 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.

🪄 Change, Then Explain!

My favorite way to reach "synthesize" - ask students to make a change and then explain the effects of that change.

🔬 Get Specific With Criteria

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

🚫 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.

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