🐝 Hexagonal Thinking 🐝
Analyze, connect, synthesize, and apply concepts. Activities involving hexagonal thinking cover all of these DOK Level 4 competencies. By providing evidence to back up their hexagonal connections, students are encouraged to think critically as they connect academic concepts. Hexagonal Thinking is the ideal review/unit-ending task. Because hexagons have six sides, students can link ideas to a variety of other concepts they've covered in class. The assessment objective is to drag labeled hexagons to join with other labeled hexagons, making connections based on commonalities. Student work samples are below. Further information about this activity may be found here.
🐙 Wicked Hydra
Wicked Hydra is a new questioning EduProtocol designed to encourage in-depth topic exploration. Students come up with questions indefinitely around a simple prompt. The protocol's founder, English teacher Jacob Carr, begins by converting all four of his classroom whiteboards into Wicked Hydra stations with the prompt in the center. Students are handed whiteboard markers and ten minutes to write questions about the prompt, while moving about the classroom. Each Wicked Hydra station will eventually have unique questions, since all questions build upon questions written earlier by other students. Following the conclusion of the 10-minute question-generating phase, the class chooses one of the Wicked Hydra boards to focus on. Students then try to give replies as class discussions are focused on the topics raised.