by Sarah B. Ottow

In your classroom, is there a focus on students being compliant versus students being engaged? Are you, as the teacher, doing the heavy lifting, cognitively speaking, and your students are not? Are your activities falling flat because students don’t seem challenged enough in critical thinking?

If you answered “yes” to any of the questions above, you may want to consider investing in more explicit cognitive engagement in your classroom. A helpful framework to build in more cognitive engagement for your students is called the Depth of Knowledge (DOK) Framework, developed by Dr. Norman Webb (1997, 2002). The DOK framework anchors pedagogy around four levels of cognitive lift so that all students can meaningfully access content standards in intellectually-rich, rigorous ways.

This article will explain DOK and then provide you a “playlist” of helpful resources for you to deepen your learning. Hopefully, with this knowledge and practice, you can cognitively engage your students. Let’s begin!

What is DOK?

Depth of Knowledge (DOK) is a framework that can be used with common language to categorize the complexity of cognitive engagement in academic tasks. Developed in the 1990s by Dr. Norman Webb, DOK helps educators align, plan and adjust their learning opportunities into four categories as follows:

DOK can be misconstrued in three ways. First, DOK distinguishes between complexity and difficulty. Note that DOK is not about more work, it’s about more intellectually engaging work. For example, some tasks can be difficult but not complex, like memorizing the periodic table abbreviations. Second, do not reduce tasks to just the verbs. In fact, Dr. Webb considers the “DOK Wheel [of Misfortune]” to be misleading because verbs alone avoid the holistic level of cognitive engagement in the task.  For example, the verb identify can be used in tasks at varying DOK levels (Identify the part of the water cycle [DOK 1] vs. Identify potential solutions for the impact of the rising water table on local flooding using multiple texts/sources. [DOK 4]) Third, DOK is not a hierarchy where tasks are presented from simple to more complex. Students should engage in tasks across all four levels of DOK, including historically marginalized groups who may be provided tasks that are “watered down” and do not advance learning. Higher-complexity tasks where students grapple with an engaging, real-world problem that may have multiple solutions can motivate engagement in more lower-complexity tasks.

How to Implement DOK in Your Classroom

To implement the DOK framework in your practice, consider the following questions from Gerald Aungst in Using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge to Increase Rigor. Aungst says, “To find the right balance, ask yourself these questions:

• What kinds of thinking do I want students to do routinely?

• If my own child were participating, what would I want [them] to be doing?

• What’s the most effective way to spend the limited classroom time I have?

Decide for yourself how often you should focus on tasks at each level so that students gain the most from the learning opportunities you design. Regardless of how you define rigor, the important thing is that students are thinking deeply on a daily basis. Webb’s Depth of Knowledge gives you a framework and common language to make that happen in your classroom.”

Let me repeat this part, “The important thing is that students are thinking on a daily basis.” So, so true! We want students to learn how to think critically through inquiry and true engagement in learning. I often say that it’s our job, as educators, to help students learn not just the content but how to teach each other and even teach themselves. That’s true preparation for not just college and career readiness but life readiness! 🤔

Before we explore some examples of DOK in classroom tasks, you may want to check out five key resources to make sure you understand the DOK framework:

1. An Inside Look at Webb’s Depth of Knowledge by Norman Webb, Sara Christopherson and Bill Morelan for a look from Dr. Webb himself!

2. In Let’s Make a DOK!, Erik M. Francis explains how DOK 1 activities are like playing Jeopardy, DOK 2 is like Top Chef, DOK 3 is like Survivor and DOK is like Shark Tank. See the image below for this game show approach, moving from lesser cognitive demand (like recalling facts) to more extensive cognitive demand (like a longer-term research and presentation project):

3. This quick overview from Alice Keeler explains DOK succinctly and shares ways increase critical thinking:

4. See how to deconstruct content standards to create DOK levels in this brief video from Erik M. Francis:

5. To review an example lesson plan, check out Ensuring Rigor for English Learners—and ALL Learners—using Depth of Knowledge by yours truly.

OPTIONAL: If you're used to using Bloom’s Taxonomy and could benefit from a comparison between Bloom’s and DOK, this video can help. If you keep watching, the following videos show examples of questions for each DOK level:

BONUS: USING AI TO GET STARTED

Magic School AI has many tools to support educators and one of them is the DOK Questions Generator. Try this tool out as a starting point if you’re looking for ideas. Remember, AI is not the end-all and be-all but a ways to generate ideas. As educators, we still need to do the intellectual prep to internalize content standards and the skills and knowledge that we are required to plan, teach and assess. Furthermore, we still want to be responsive in the moment teaching back and forth and not use a tight script per se.

Examples of DOK Across Content Areas

Learning about the DOK framework is one thing. Putting it into practice in your classroom is another thing altogether. Let’s look at some examples from some content areas to contextualize the framework across the four DOK levels:

• If you are a teacher or leader in the arts, including music, theater, dance and visual arts, check out this collection of examples for your content area from the Colorado Arts Education Association.

• If you are a teacher or leader in the area of ELA or History/Social Studies, review the examples provided on pages 8, 12, 16 and 20 in this Guide for Using DOK with the CCSS Flip Chart. The guidelines and description of each DOK levels in this document are also very useful.

• If you are a teacher or leader in the area of Math or Science, review the examples provided on pages 9, 13, 17 and 21 in this Guide for Using DOK with the CCSS Flip Chart. The guidelines and description of each DOK levels in this document are also very useful.

Now I am going to model how to analyze the various strategies to engage students in different DOK levels in two classroom video clips. After that, you can view videos to do the same thing, analyzing the tasks using the DOK levels we’ve learned about.

Here is the first video from Katherine Mullin:

In this science lesson, students are asked to explain what’s going on in their terrarium and justify their explanation with evidence from their terrarium. I would say this task is DOK 3 because students need to use deeper inquiry and evidence. You may have noticed that the teacher also asked the students to explain to their friend what she just said. I cannot stress the importance of this strategy enough. By asking students to paraphrase what the teacher said, she is not only checking for their understanding of the task but she is also asking them to use the target academic language with each other. This quick step boosts student agency, interaction and academic language development for all students. (For more on going beyond turn and talk, see a similar method called Paraphrasing Partners from Confianza.)

The teacher then guides the students to work in groups to examine what’s happening in their terrarium, further deepening the cognitive rigor and engagement. I imagine this is a multi-day project and perhaps bringing in various texts to support the objectives, making this a DOK 4 task. However, within this project is both DOK 1 and DOK 2 since students need to recall basic facts (DOK 1) and make connections using basic reasoning (DOK 2).

The next example is of a high school ELL SLIFE classroom. Be sure to start at time 27:15 or click on the chapter titled, “SLIFE Example.” As you watch, consider which DOK levels the students are engaged in.

I’ve drawn out the various tasks the students are engaged in with my explanation for each. Do you agree? Why or why not?

Your turn to analyze classroom tasks for DOK Levels!

Now, your turn! This set of videos below is from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. If you open up this video below in YouTube, you’ll see a list of twenty-four different standards-based classroom lesson clips in the top right corner. You can also go directly to this playlist at this link. I recommend you choose content and/or grade level examples that connect to your context. As you watch each lesson clip, analyze what levels of DOK you see in the various tasks. You can do this on your own or you can do this in a team to calibrate together what you see, hear and think using the DOK framework.

I hope this collection of tips and resources, along with modeling and practice using classroom examples has been useful for you. Hopefully your students can benefit from more intentionally designed tasks and do more of the heavy lifting, ultimately resulting in more student engagement and a love of learning!

Guiding Questions

Check out the following reflective questions to support you going forward:

• (DOK 1) What is Depth of Knowledge (DOK)?

• (DOK 2) Can you give some examples of student tasks at various DOK levels from your own classroom?

• (DOK 3) Why is DOK a helpful framework for boosting cognitive engagement and rigor? Support your thinking with evidence from the texts and videos from the playlist.

• (DOK 4) Create a long-term plan for incorporating tasks from all four DOK levels of an upcoming unit of study. Use your content standards to ground all tasks. Present your plan to your colleagues for feedback. Bonus: Analyze student work to see if students met the demands of the standards and the DOK levels you taught.

Sarah B. Ottow is the founder of Confianza and the author of The Language Lens for Content Classrooms: A Guidebook for Teachers, Coaches and Leaders (2nd edition).