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Ian Byrd: Byrdseed
Lessons and Ideas using Depth and Complexity and other GT tools

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The Depth and Complexity icons are eleven tools that act as lenses, prompting students to look at a topic in a new way. They will help you to take your students deeper into grade-level material rather than moving them onto a new topic.

Sound too good to be true? Read on!

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Hey, if this long article is way too long you can take it in more leisurely through the Depth and Complexity Mailer. You'll get an email every week introducing a couple of the prompts. It's free!
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Onward!

Table of Contents

The Back Story

The overarching goal of Depth and Complexity is to move students towards expert knowledge of content. Bette Gould and Sandra Kaplan looked to understand how an expert understands their field differently from a layperson. Through interviews, they saw that these experts knew things like repeating patterns, required rules, ethical dilemmas, changes over time, and essential vocabulary within their field.

They identified eleven of these traits and assigned a name and a symbol to each. The idea is that students can move closer to an expert's level of understanding by thinking through these same lenses.

A Quick Example

The prompts of Depth and Complexity will sharpen your questions - and your students' answers.

See the sharpness in action:

"Compare and contrast Lincoln and Washington"

"Contrast the ⚖️ ethical dilemmas Lincoln and Washington faced."

"Compare the 🚦 rules Lincoln and Washington created as presidents."

See how broad and vague that first question is? It invites surface-level thinking. Using a prompt of Depth and Complexity raises expectations.

About Those Icons

Each tool is represented by an icon that gives students a visual shortcut to expert thinking. The tools' icons especially benefit younger students or those learning English. They unlock access to higher levels of thinking than those students' vocabulary would otherwise support. But their use should not be limited to just those students.

Even as a grownup, I use the icons when I take notes. If I spot an interesting dilemma, I'll sketch a little ethics icon to call it out. When I see a student draw an icon on their work, I know that they're calling out a certain way of thinking.

A final note about the graphical icons: beware relying on pretty clip art or professionally designed images. It sets the bar too high. Instead, draw the icons by hand as you teach. Encourage students to do the same. The Depth and Complexity prompts are ultimately students' tools, and students should feel empowered to use their tools whether they have access to specific clip art or not.
Sidenote: Read about why I use emoji for depth and complexity icons when using devices. They're free and easily accessible anywhere.
Depth and Complexity Basics

Here are the eleven prompts of Depth and Complexity along with a teeny explanation and a link to full articles.

❓
Unanswered Questions
Perhaps the most under-used of the prompts. It's so much more than "What questions do you have?" Instead, push students towards what we don't yet know about this topic. Or what can't we know? Consider questions that are truly unanswered to humankind.

📚
Across Disciplines
How does this topic represent an intersection of other fields? How do language arts and math appear within this topic?

📈

Trends

How a topic is currently changing and what forces are causing those changes? Trends is the prompt I'd most like to get rid of.

So that's the eleven prompts of Depth and Complexity. Yeah, there are a lot! But there's no need to use them all at first. Get comfy with, like, four. Plus, you'll be surprised how quickly you start to pick them up.

Want to get a series of emails explaining each Depth and Complexity prompt? Sign up for free here!

The Biggest Problem with Depth and Complexity

Without a doubt, the biggest problem people make with Depth and Complexity is: pairing an icon with a low level of Bloom's Taxonomy.

Look at these three tasks and think about what the level of thinking that each requires:

Identify the rules in this math problem.

List the important details about George Washington.

What are the patterns in the solar system?

Do you see it? ☝️ Every one of those questions requires merely a list as an answer. Even though I might be taking the content deeper, I'm still asking super low-level questions. I'm at the bottom of Bloom's - despite using depth and complexity.

And, now that I'm aware of it, I see it everywhere. Do a search for "depth and complexity worksheets" and spot all of the low-level questions out there. It's almost impossible to find any examples where the icons paired with high levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.

So please make sure to pair depth and complexity with high levels of thinking:

Compare/Contrast: How is Poe's 👄 language different from Lewis Carrol's?

Evaluate: Which author most effectively uses 👄 language to create their tone?

Synthesize: What would happen to the tone if we used some of Carrol's 👄language in The Raven.

See how we can go beyond "list the vocabulary words" and really get kids thinking?

Depth and Complexity Resources

Ok! Let's take a break here and I'll point you to a few Depth and Complexity resources that I've had a hand in creating:

If you'd like to continue on, I have an article about how to introduce depth and complexity to students.

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Depth and Complexity Icons: Everything You Need to Know!

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The dimensions of depth and complexity are a great first step towards a classroom differentiated for gifted learners. Learn the basics of these thinking tools and begin incorporating them into your lessons tomorrow!

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Big Idea Graphic Organizer with Details

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Blank Frame Organizer

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If you've used the various Depth and Complexity jpeg icons out there, you've almost certainly run into their big drawback.

You know what I mean.

Drag an icon into Word and BOOM your layout explodes. When I drop one into a presentation, it's always the wrong size. If I stretch them out, they get all pixelated.

The icon images out there are difficult to use even in multimedia-friendly tools like Word. What happens when a student wants to include an icon in an email or some other app? If students can't do this easily, it diminishes the usefulness of Depth and Complexity. Depth and Complexity should be something kids can use all of the time. As we do more and more digitally, this is going to become a bigger problem.

Students' use of Depth and Complexity shouldn't be hindered by the icons' images. The specific images of the icons should serve a supporting role, empowering student thinking no matter what the context.

Jpeg images simply are not up for the task.

Table of Contents

Emoji Possibilities

Here are my thoughts about which emoji would work with which depth and complexity prompts. I've broken them into three categories:

1. Obvious replacements for existing icons.

These are natural fits as they look just like the official icons:

Big Idea: 🏛️ or 🏠

Details: 🌻

Language of the Discipline: 👄

Trends: 📈

Unanswered Questions: ❓

Multiple Perspectives: 👓

Change Over Time: ⏳

2. No obvious replacement, but I like them (better!).

There aren't emoji that obviously fit with Ethics and Rules. BUT! I think the justice scales and traffic light emoji work even better than the jpeg icons. They're easy to draw and connect pretty clearly to the meaning of their Depth and Complexity prompts.

3. Not so sure.

And here's the last group. I think these work, but I'm not 100% thrilled with them.

Patterns: 🌀 A spiral is definitely a pattern. But is this the best emoji to represent patterns? Send me your thoughts. (Friend of the site, Julie Paik, recommended the checkered flag 🏁 since it has a pattern of colors and shapes but also has a beginning and end. Nice!)

Across Disciplines: 📚 I like the stack of books to represent multiple disciplines, but it's less obvious when kids draw it. Might look like just three rectangles. But maybe that's ok?

Remember, an icon just symbolizes an idea. The particular icon is not the focus; the idea is. If you use one clock, and I use another, we can still tell we're both thinking about how something Changes Over Time. And that thinking is what matters.

Students Own These Tools

Emoji open up this incredible discussion with your students:

How would you symbolize Ethics, class?

Your students get to decide how they would represent repeating Patterns, unbreakable Rules, or Multiple Perspectives. That's powerful! It brings us back to the true purpose of having icons at all: to represent deeper and more complex thinking. And it's so much more interesting than opening the year by telling students " This is what Ethics looks like!"

Seriously, it bums me out that I (a pre-emoji teacher) didn't get to do this activity with my own students

No Such Thing As "Official" Icons

Now, it's worth noting that there are no "official" icons. Any sets of colorful, professional images you see out there were not developed by Sandra Kaplan and Bette Gould. In fact, the icons' images are the only thing about Depth and Complexity that can be under copyright. The framework was developed under a federal grant, so it's in the public domain. But any specific icons were designed later and may be under copyright.

Yours Can Look Different From Mine

Perhaps you've noticed there's actually no one version of emoji. Every company uses the same set of emoji, but different implementations. So Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Twitter all have slightly different emoji. Look at all of the different versions of "Face With Hand Over Mouth".

I love this because it reinforces that there's no "correct" symbol. Remember, the icons are students' tools. Students should have ownership of them. As I wrote earlier, when I started teaching, we didn't have official, professionally designed images. We used random clip-art or drew them by hand. My hand-drawn Language of the Discipline lips were notoriously weird ( check them out!), but my students got a kick out of it and knew what they symbolized. The emphasis was on the thinking that those lips symbolized, not the lips themselves (what a weird sentence).

Your phone may have different looking lips than my Chromebook. Your laptop might have different ethics scales than the ones on Twitter, but that's fine. The symbols aren't the focus, it's the idea behind the symbol that we care about.

Improving on the Icons

I even think emoji lets us improve on the official imagery. Like, um, why are Big Idea and Details a Greek building and a flower? So weird, right? Let students make it better!

Since Big Idea and Details work so nicely together (one is zoomed-out and one is zoomed-in), why don't we take advantage of that connection?

We could use 🌳 for Big Idea and 🍃 for Details (forest vs tree)

Or 🌊 for Big Idea and 💧 for Details (ocean vs a drop)

Either set represents the idea of zooming out to see the big picture and then zooming in to see the details. Let your students improve on the existing symbols! See what they can come up with.

Content Imperatives

If you also use the Content Imperatives, then there's a set of emoji that work beautifully with each of those prompts, too!

Emoji 101

Finally, here are some technical reasons why using emoji works so nicely for digital Depth and Complexity icons.

1. Emoji are automatically everywhere. You don't have to download and install them! Whether you're on Windows, Mac, a Chromebook, a phone, or some doodad that hasn't been invented yet, it has emoji built-in!

2. Emoji are standardized. Whatever device you use, the set of emoji is the same (even if they look slightly different). This is because there's an official gosh-darn consortium that regulates emoji!

3. Emoji are native. Devices treat them like plain ol' letters, numbers, or punctuation marks. So you can resize them just like text. They plop right into textboxes. They work in any app that you can type into. And, thank goodness, emoji don't break Word's layouts!

4. Emoji are designed to be small, but the jpeg Depth and Complexity icons are designed to be poster-sized. If you scale them down to match a 12pt font in Word, they lose their readability. Emoji are meant to be text-sized.

5. They're legal! Unlike the jpeg icons, which can be under copyright, there are many versions of emoji that are completely free to use. Emojipedia has licensing information.

Plus, look how easy emoji are to pop into Word:

On a Mac, press control+command+spacebar

On Windows, it's Win+period or Win+semicolon (or so I've read!)

I think I am even more excited about using emoji for Depth and Complexity's digital icons now than I was when I started writing.

Does this mean you don't use the jpeg images at all? Of course not. If you like the posters, hang them up! Although, I personally like my students to create their own Depth and Complexity posters. If you like the magnets, use them! The point is to empower students to be able to use depth and complexity in any context. As we move more and more towards digital tools, we need a good solution for bringing depth and complexity with us.

Emoji are a surprisingly elegant solution.

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Emoji as Digital Depth and Complexity Icons

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While the official depth and complexity icons look great, they lead to all kinds of problems in the digital world and also take ownership away from students. Emoji are an elegant solution to both problems.

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Teachers understanding the icons

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For my excerpt do I write only the information or everything?