Enrichment Must Prompt Thinking Enrichment is not merely about doing fun things. It should never be just a project-of-the-week. It must be about getting students thinking in new and interesting ways. Here's how!
Students Need More Than Independent Work It's so easy to just ask advanced students to work by themselves in a corner. But, the more advanced the kid, the more they need advanced instruction and adult guidance.
Fluency: Asking For (Way) More Than One Answer Being able to generate many possible answers is key to high-level thinking. So why don't we ask students to do it more often?
Which One is Not Like The Others? When we ask kids "which one is not like the others", our cleverest students love to find ways to pick the non-obvious answer. So why not use this as a framework for pushing students deeper into our content.
First Levels: Sentence Starters As silly as it may sound, providing sentence stems or "fill in the blanks" can give your kids the scaffold they need to achieve a higher level of success.
Running A Curiosity Project Merlin Mann stated that employees’ motivation increases when they get to “build a robot” once in a while. That is, do something creative beyond regular work. Can we do this at school? Offices have “casual Fridays,” can we have “curiosity Fridays?"
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.
No Street Names In Japan? Do your learners use the tool 👓 multiple perspectives to analyze stories, problems, and historical events? Here's a TED Talk about real-life multiple perspectives that will make your students (and you!) reconsider basic assumptions.
Introducing “Criteria” To Students Teaching our students to identify the criteria behind a decision will make them better decision makers and help them understand others' points of views.
Get Students Out Of Creative Ruts Sometimes students need a little structure to force them into a more creative state of mind. Here are a few ideas for interesting writing prompts
