Here’s an example of a question I asked my students:

⚖️ What moral or ethical issues are raised in this book? What controversies exist?

Now, the first problem is that this question is way too wordy. I often gave my class rough drafts of questions. Nowadays, I want to make sure to proofread, revise, and have another adult check over anything I’m giving my students. I call this testing my soup.

So, I’ll rewrite my question to be clearer:

Original ⚖️ What moral or ethical issues are raised in this book? What controversies exist?
Edited What ⚖️ ethical issues are raised in this book?

I Aimed for a Mere List!

The question is clearer, but it’s still not a good use of Depth and Complexity. It’s low-level. My students will just write a list of ethical issues. That’s neither deep nor complex!

I want to write specific, high-level questions that will form a sequence.

So, first, I don’t like generic questions. Many of my old questions were sick with Vagueness Disease. If we’re reading a book, I should ask questions intended for that particular book. I should give my students a particularly juicy ethical issue from our story.

Let’s use The Cat in the Hat as our model. I’ll pick this ethical issue: When mom returns, the kids have to decide if they’ll tell her what happened or keep it a secret.

My goal isn’t for students to identify an ethical problem. I want them to think about an interesting problem. Now, I can build a sequence of scaffolded tasks:

⚖️ Our Dilemma When mom returns, the kids have to decide if they’ll tell her what happened or keep it a secret.

  1. Which characters would want the children to tell the truth? 👓 Consider the Cat, the Fish, and the mom.
  2. What would be the immediate effects of the children telling the truth?
  3. Write an ending where the kids DO tell their mom what happened.
  4. How does this new ending change 🏛️ the moral of The Cat in The Hat?

Consider how much better that sequence is than our original question:

The Original What moral or ethical issues are raised in this book? What controversies exist?

When we use depth and complexity, we have to make sure we’re really taking students deeper. And that’s usually done by focusing on Bloom’s Taxonomy.