Have you ever heard of or seen a new teaching strategy from a coworker and said, “I have to try that TOMORROW!”? That was me last week when I heard about Hexagonal Thinking from the Brave New Teaching Podcast. It just SOUNDS cool.
I immediately paused my podcast, put down my vacuum ( because who doesn’t listen to podcasts while they’re cleaning? It’s a thing, I swear), and ran to my computer. I googled “Hexagonal Thinking” and found Betsy Potash’s incredibly innovative strategy for critical thinking on her Spark Creativity blog. I was immediately obsessed and worked it into my Hamlet lesson for the next week.
Here’s how the Hexagonal Thinking strategy works:
- Students start with a bunch of hexagons that are labelled with different terms related to the concept you’re teaching. In my case, it was the themes of revenge and madness in Hamlet.
- Students shift the hexagons around, creating connections between each of the terms. Every hexagon that touches another must have some kind of logical connection.
- Students justify 6 of their connections in writing.
Yes, it’s that easy!
My school is in blended learning mode, so some of my students are virtual and some of them are in person. We use Google Classroom as our LMS, so I decided to use Google slides to create the activity for students, and Betsy has an amazing template if you head to her website. I wanted mine to reflect the mood of Hamlet, so I created my own based off of hers.
Here’s how it looked:
I made a square slide and connected a bunch of hexagon shapes together and colored them. I added a rectangle in the center of each with a drop shadow so that students could easily place the terms, then downloaded the slide as a .png file and made it the background of a new slide deck for the assignment. Finally, I chose a variety of terms related to the themes of Hamlet and added them as text boxes.
I’ve never done anything like this before in my class. They are seniors in their last semester of high school, so it takes a lot to get them excited about anything. When I introduced the activity, I knew it was a gamble. To my surprise, my young scholars were PUMPED!
What did the students think?
“Miss, this is low- key fun”
“It’s like a puzzle, but Hamlet – style.”
I knew students were engaged because as I flipped through their decks on Google Classroom, every single student was moving around their little text boxes. With the help of Hexagonal Thinking, I performed a mini- miracle. We actually had a lot of fun debating which words should go where, and students were quick to point out that I should have included Ophelia. It was amazing seeing the high- level connections that students were making and a lot of them were drawing conclusions that told me they will be so ready to write their culminating essays next week.
Here’s a partially finished Hexagonal Thinking Map for Hamlet:
The consensus with my students is that Hexagonal Thinking is an official win. Students are drawing conclusions and developing claims while backing them up with logical reasoning – all while playing with words. It kind of felt like sneaking zucchini into muffins to trick your kids into eating more veggies. I will DEFINITELY be doing this activity again!
As a bonus, I love that students can do this in person or online – and they can do a tactile version or digital. Here’s how I prep all activities for in-person and remote ( or absent) students.
Short on time? Head to my Teachers Pay Teachers store for a pre-made, fully editable, print and digital copy of Hamlet Hexagonal Thinking (and other texts)!
Have you used Hexagonal Thinking with your students? How did it go? Let me know in the comments!
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