Settling into Germany & Starting a New Year of Teaching
Thinking Routines: Connect, Extend, Challenge.
After a whirlwind summer of relocating, I’ve now settled into life in Germany and begun at my new school. It’s been a period of transition for my family and me, but also a chance to reset professionally and think about the year ahead with fresh eyes.
The move itself was both exciting and daunting. Uprooting from a place where you’ve taught and lived for years means leaving behind familiarity, colleagues, and routines. At the same time, starting fresh offers that rare opportunity to reflect, re-evaluate, and reimagine your practice. For me, it has been energising to walk into a new context with the mindset: What kind of teacher do I want to be here, now, with these students?
Professional Growth Through Triads
One of the most exciting initiatives I’ve stepped into at my new school is the use of Triads—a model of peer coaching and professional development that pairs teachers across disciplines.
Each triad contains three rotating roles: coach, mentor, and mentee. Together, we cycle through observation, feedback, and reflection.
The purpose of these triads is not simply accountability, but growth.
What makes this particularly rich is that we aren’t just grouped within subject departments. My triad includes colleagues from other disciplines, which means I’m constantly seeing pedagogy through fresh eyes. A science teacher might notice patterns in how I structure student questioning, while I might comment on how they scaffold extended writing. It breaks down the silos we sometimes fall into and helps us see our practice in wider, transferable ways.
Our Shared Inquiry
Our collective focus this year is on embedding inquiry-driven pedagogy into the curriculum. We are framing our conversations and experiments around a guiding question:
To what extent does scaffolding inquiry with visible thinking routines deepen students’ connections between lessons?
The phrasing is deliberate. It acknowledges that inquiry can’t just be left open-ended; it needs structure, otherwise students may drift or feel lost. At the same time, it pushes us to consider how those structures—the scaffolds—either help or hinder the connections students make.
For me, this has meant leaning more heavily into Harvard Project Zero Thinking Routines. I’ve used them before, but this year I’m making a conscious effort to bring them to the forefront of my teaching. They’re deceptively simple tools, but they offer consistent ways of helping students surface their thinking, reflect on their learning, and make visible what might otherwise remain hidden.
First Steps: Connect – Extend – Challenge
The first routine I’ve trialled is Connect – Extend – Challenge.
At its heart, the routine has three prompts:
Connect: How does this new idea connect to what you already know?
Extend: How does it extend your thinking in new directions?
Challenge: What puzzles or questions does it raise for you?
It’s a routine that encourages students to situate new learning in relation to their prior knowledge, while also stretching and questioning it. That balance—between grounding and growth—is what makes it so effective.
You can download a worksheet from here.
Putting It Into Practice: Dystopian Worlds
I brought this routine into a Grade 9 English unit on dystopian fiction. The unit is designed to explore the recurring themes and characteristics of dystopian worlds, and at this stage we were focusing on the idea that citizens are under constant surveillance.
Some students were grasping this well, but others were struggling to move beyond surface-level examples from the texts. They could spot the dystopian trope, but they hadn’t yet internalised what it really meant, or why it mattered.
So I decided to create a hook that would bridge the gap between fiction and reality. The lesson centred on a passage from Fahrenheit 451—the section introducing the Mechanical Hound. This eerie, programmed creature embodies the theme of surveillance and control in Bradbury’s novel. To make the parallels more vivid, I paired the reading with a short clip and news image about contemporary surveillance systems, including China’s social credit system and everyday CCTV tracking.
The Warmer: Connect – Extend – Challenge
Before diving into the reading, I asked students to complete the Connect – Extend – Challenge routine in response to the real-world examples. I played this video from youtube and got them to jot down some ideas using this template.
Connect: Students quickly linked the surveillance clip to things they already knew—apps that track locations, cameras in shops, even their own school’s use of ID cards. A few drew connections to games and films they’d seen. They also connected to elements that appeared in the book.
Extend: Once they began reading about the Mechanical Hound, they started noticing how fiction extended their thinking. “It’s like CCTV but scarier because it doesn’t forget,” one student remarked. Another suggested it extended the idea of control: if a machine can track you relentlessly, you can never escape.
Challenge: This is where the richest discussion emerged. Some students asked whether surveillance is always a bad thing. “If it’s there to protect us, why should we worry?” one argued. Others pushed back, raising the tension between safety and freedom.
Even though I only used the routine in the warmer, its ripple effects were felt across the whole lesson.
Deepening the Lesson
From there, the lesson unfolded in stages:
Mini-reading & annotation: Students highlighted what made the Hound frightening and how Bradbury communicated surveillance.
Group inquiry: They compared the Hound to the modern surveillance example, filling a T-chart with “How surveillance works” and “Impact on people.”
Discussion: We moved into a spiderweb discussion around the debatable question: Does surveillance make society safer or more dangerous?
Exit ticket: Students ended by writing one similarity or difference between Fahrenheit 451 and today’s surveillance.
The earlier Connect – Extend – Challenge routine had set them up beautifully. They weren’t just reading Bradbury’s description; they were making conceptual links, challenging each other, and carrying insights across tasks.
Reflections on Impact
What struck me most was how quickly the routine raised the level of discourse. By starting with personal connections, students who might normally stay quiet had something to say. The extension step gave others a chance to build on the fiction with more abstract ideas. And the challenge step ensured we didn’t just stop at agreement but leaned into debate.
Even though I only used the routine in the warmer, it gave depth and energy to the rest of the lesson. Students referred back to their “challenge” questions during the discussion, and some even echoed them in their exit tickets. It was a vivid reminder that a short, well-structured routine at the beginning can shape the entire inquiry.
Looking Ahead
This experience has reinforced for me how vital scaffolding is in inquiry-driven classrooms. Inquiry doesn’t mean leaving students to figure everything out alone. It means giving them the structures and routines that allow their thinking to deepen, their voices to surface, and their learning to connect across lessons.
As I continue with this triad cycle, I’ll be documenting other thinking routines—See, Think, Wonder, Claim, Support, Question, and more—and reflecting on how they play out in different contexts. My aim is not just to try them, but to ask: What difference do they make to student outcomes?
Moving to Germany has given me a fresh start in many ways. Settling into a new country and a new school can be overwhelming, but it has also provided me with the motivation to refine my practice, take risks, and embrace inquiry more fully.
If my first steps with Connect – Extend – Challenge are anything to go by, this year promises to be an exciting journey of both teaching and learning.
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