When planning a lesson, it’s key to understand the difference between the “thinking” and the “product”. You might say that Thinking is about students’ brains while the Product is about their hands.
🧠 Thinking: how students will manipulate information with their brains. I use Bloom’s Taxonomy for this.
✍️ Product: what students make to show us their thinking. Could be an essay, a drawing, a speech, a model, etc.
⚠️ It is possible to have fancy-looking products, but a low-level of thinking. In fact, I think it’s pretty common. If you’d walked through my classroom in my early days, you’d have seen beautiful models and colorful worksheets… that merely restated already known information.
Restate the Order… but in 3D!!
Read this objective and consider how students thought about the content.
Create a three-dimensional model of the solar system showing the planets in order.
Your most brilliant student has no opportunity to show off their brain. All they can do is… put the planets in the right order. Same as your most average thinker. Same as your student who is barely passing. There’s one right answer (and we already know it). While this task will highlight my best artists (or most helpful parents!), it doesn’t have any room for impressive thinking.
A Wax Museum
I’ve written before about a wax museum project that shares a similar problem:
Students will dress up as a person from history and recite a summary of that person’s life.
Hopefully, you see the problem. Students are just restating known information while the focus is on how nice the product looks – whether it’s a costume, a model, a diorama, etc. There’s no analysis. No evaluation. No synthesis. Just remember and restate.
Every “Research” Project Ever
When my students wrote a “research” paper, they were really just paraphrasing existing facts. There was no new thinking going on. No new ideas. I should have called my “research” papers “Restate Papers.” When a scientist engages in research, they are finding something new. In my class, students just wrote a summary of the old.
More on how to upgrade research reports here.
Science Experiments
Most of the things I called “science experiments” were not experiments at all. An experiment means you don’t know what the heck is going to happen. But every “experiment” I ran produced predictable results. Those weren’t experiments. They were just demonstrations. Which is a fancy way of giving students information we already know. Which can be fine! But I confused it with high-level thinking. Just because something is complicated doesn’t mean students are thinking about the content in an interesting way.
Is There Room for Thinking?
The key to fixing this problem is to start your planning with the kind of thinking you want and, only at the end of your planning, decide on what the product will be.
✅ Start with: “This lesson is going to be about finding unexpected relationships amongst the planets.”
🚫 Not “This task is about making a model.”
✅ Start here: “This lesson is about contrasting different perspectives about this person.”
🚫 Not “Everyone will dress up as a famous person.”
✅ Start with “In this task, students will be making a small change and explaining the effects.”
🚫 Not “Students will work in Google Slides.”
✅ Start with: “Students will contrast how different rocket designs perform and make recommendations for three audiences with different needs.”
🚫 Not: “My class will build rockets.”
A final product will flow naturally from high-level thinking. In fact, students will often come up with their own ways to show off their thinking. If you use my lessons at Byrdseed.TV, you may have noticed that I usually leave the final product up to you and your students. I want to get the thinking right.
To check, I ask myself will I be able to tell the highest-ability kid from their peers just by looking at what they produce? Does the task have room for them to show off their interesting thinking? In other words, is the ceiling high enough for my brightest kids to stand up.