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These are teaching topics that I used to think were great and now I've… had a change of mind. I hope I'm right this time!
There's lots of faux-differentiation out there. In this article, I catalog a few anti-patterns: tactics that look like differentiation, but are actually quite the opposite.
Asking kids what they’re interested in should be simple, right? But look online for “interest inventories” and you’ll find multi-page documents with dozens of questions! Let’s keep this simple.
Frames, a graphic organizer often used with the Depth and Complexity framework, have one big trap that I fell into for years.
Why I now strike the phrase “have a discussion” from my lesson plans.
“I want to challenge my students” is just about the most common goal out there. Unfortunately, I think it’s not quite the right word…
I used to create extension menus, thinking they were an essential tool for differentiation. Overtime, I’ve changed my thinking. Here’s why.
If you ask a teacher to list their top three complaints about teaching, “grading” will be on just about everyone’s list. I know that I absolutely despised all of the weekends lost to grading essays, tests, quizzes, projects, and so on. But, the thing is, I never stopped to ask myself: do I actually need to do all of this grading?
“Engagement” is a nice by-product of a well-designed lesson, but it sure isn’t our actual goal as educators.
I used to think that adding “explain why” to the end of a question somehow made it higher-level. But now I see two problems in asking students to “explain their thinking”.
Why I stopped looking for “real world” problems and started aiming for “interesting.” The real world is often tedious and annoying. Interesting never is!
I love Margaret Robertson’s piece about how typical gamification items like badges and levels completely miss the point of what makes games great. Take a look.