Do your gifted learners use the complexity tool of “multiple perspectives” to analyze stories, problems, and historical events? Here’s a TED Talk (link here in case you can’t see the video below) about real-life multiple perspectives that will make your students (and you!) reconsider basic assumptions:
When I show my students a video like this, I ask them to delve deeper using the depth and complexity thinking tools. Here’s one possible procedure:
- First, I plan for a discussion about the video itself. No winging it! Prepare for the discussion with good questions.
- Students then create a combination of depth and complexity tools that matches their interpretation of the video. For this video, students might come up with:
- 👓 Multiple perspectives cause ⚖️ ethical problems.
- 🚦 Rules from other cultures can change our own 👓 point of view.
- 👄 Language can reveal unexpected 🌻 details about peoples’ 👓 perspectives. (Yeah, that’s three prompts!)
- Students then spend time generating examples from other disciplines that match their statement. This is a deductive thinking exericse. I explain that process a bit more in this article, too.
- We then have a day of presentations in which students (or small groups) explain the statement they created as well as the examples and/or non-examples they thought of.
And, of course, I’d keep these 🏛️ Big Ideas hanging around the classroom so that we can refer to them later.