Imported from kvond/answerable-skills (skills/vt-deck-authoring/SKILL.md). Install upstream with npx skills add kvond/answerable-skills --skill vt-deck-authoring. Copyright stays with the author.

vt-deck-authoring

Public-facing. This skill ships with two companion documents: the rationale, and the case file. Read the case file first. It will not take long and the rest of this makes a different kind of sense afterward.

0. What this skill will and will not do

It will carry the structure: the order of the questions, what has to be held still while something else varies, how exposed the work is, the format, and the checks.

It will not decide what is worth teaching in your content, whether a student's question should be followed, or when to abandon the plan. Those are yours. The structure exists so there is room left for them.

[If you find yourself wanting the skill to make one of those calls, that is worth noticing. It usually means the content decision underneath has not been made yet.]

1. Before any slide exists

Answer these three, in writing, before building.

1. What is the critical aspect? The one feature of this phenomenon a student must be able to discern in order to understand it. Not the topic. Not the standard. The thing that, if she cannot see it varying, leaves her unable to reason about the rest.

2. What varies, and what is held invariant? A student discerns an aspect by meeting cases that differ in that aspect and in nothing else. If your examples differ in three ways, she cannot tell which difference matters, and she will usually pick the wrong one.

3. What does she already have to have discerned? Cycles depend on each other. Write down the dependency.

2. The 5 core questions

In this order, once for each critical aspect.

1. Critical Aspect question. Opens the aspect.
2. Contrast Set. Case A against Case B. Everything the same except one thing.
3. Build a Rule. The student completes a sentence stating a general rule.
4. Pattern Break. The case that strains the rule she just made.
5. 3-Tier Question. Getting Started, Working On It, Mastery. With a word bank, offered as "use any, modify any, or use none."

The vocabulary is 5 core questions and slide types. Use no other word for them — not in a deck, not in a manual, not in sales copy, not in this file.

The rule on question 1, and it is where most cycles fail in the room. An aspect is a difference. A question that names a thing without naming a difference cannot be answered, and the class goes quiet. "How are polar bears adapted?" produces silence. "Which polar bear is more adapted, one with long fur or short fur?" produces an answer, and then "why did you choose?" opens it.

Put the variation inside the question. Do not name the aspect on slide 1 and wait for the Contrast Set on slide 2 to supply the difference.

The check, and it is mechanical. Does the Critical Aspect question text itself contain a comparison, a choice between named alternatives, or a stated change condition? If it does not, it is structurally the polar bear question, whatever its subject, and the room will go quiet before the contrast arrives.

Narrow first, then widen. This inverts the common failure, where a teacher asks open, meets silence, and collapses into gap-fill — at which point the chance to explore is gone.

3. The four conditional slide types

Use only where the content calls for them. Forcing one on every cycle is the commonest way this design gets flattened.

6. Continuity question. A question with no answer to look up.
7. Stock-and-flow model. Only where the aspect turns on a quantity that fills and drains.
8. Compensatory pair. Two aspects vary inversely while the outcome stays the same, so neither alone predicts it.
9. Conflict case. One case in which opposing pulls cannot be resolved from either aspect alone.

The numbering is not decoration. The 5 core questions are moves 1 through 5 and the four conditional structures are moves 6 through 9. Moves 7, 8 and 9 are the coordination structures, and section 5 is where you choose between them.

A cycle that carries none of the four is not thereby defective. A cycle that carries one you cannot give a reason for is.

3b. The nine moves, and where they come from

Nine moves, each with a cognitive purpose and a source. The lineage runs Marton and Tsui → Moore-Anderson → von Duyke.

Marton supplies the four patterns of variation — contrast, generalization, separation, fusion — and the intended, enacted and lived objects of learning. Learning and Awareness (Marton and Booth, 1997); Classroom Discourse and the Space of Learning (Marton and Tsui, 2004); Necessary Conditions of Learning (2015).

Moore-Anderson supplies two things: that the question must contain the variation, and stock-and-flow as a question form for rate against amount. Teaching Meaning: What Works When Telling Isn't Enough; Difference Maker.

von Duyke supplies the sequence, the repetition unit, the coordination structures beyond stock-and-flow, the coordination layer, and the distribution of judgment.

[Citation caution, and it matters if you write any of this up. Moore-Anderson is an independent practitioner-author, not peer-reviewed literature. Cite him for the design lineage — that is honest and it is correct — and ground the underlying claims in Marton and Tsui, so a reviewer has something she can check.]

[Open, and carried here as open: whether the what-if is a tenth move or a required companion to whichever coordination structure a cycle carries. It is treated as a companion throughout this file, because it tests coordination rather than creating it. That has not been settled.]

4. Simultaneity, and the two questions that follow from it

A teacher says a student does not conceptualize it. That is a verdict with no next move attached, and the default responses — more review, more practice — address neither of the two things that could actually be wrong.

Marton's construct is simultaneity: holding more than one thing in awareness at once. It divides two ways, and your cycle works on one of them or on both.

Synchronic simultaneity. Two or more critical aspects present in the same case, in the same moment, so the student has to coordinate them to resolve it. This is fusion in the strict sense, and section 5 is how you build for it.

Diachronic simultaneity. Things met at different times brought into awareness together, so relations between them become discernible for the first time. Nothing new is introduced; a sequence becomes a structure. The Concept Bank does this, and it is the harder of the two to engineer. Most curricula do not attempt it.

The diagnostic that follows, and it is the most useful thing in this file:

Same observed performance. Opposite instruction. A student who has not separated the aspects needs another contrast and will be wasted on a fusion case; a student who separated them cleanly and did not coordinate them will sit through another contrast learning nothing she does not already have.

Both terms are teacher-facing, with a one-line gloss. Neither appears in anything a student reads. No coding vocabulary to students, ever.

5. The fusion decision

Separating aspects one at a time is not the end of the work. A student can discern each aspect cleanly and still fail to coordinate them, which shows up on a transfer task and gets misread as low effort.

Ask: can two of my critical aspects operate at the same time in a real case?

If yes, pick the structure that fits. These are moves 7, 8 and 9.

• Stock-and-flow (move 7) — the aspects are a quantity and the rates that change it.
• Compensatory pair (move 8) — two aspects vary inversely while the outcome stays the same, so neither alone predicts it. Sea turtle and elephant: a hundred eggs with almost no survival, one calf with high survival, both populations steady.
• Conflict case (move 9) — one aspect points one way, another points the other, and the case cannot be resolved from either alone. Legless snakes.

If no, say so and record why. Some content has no coordination to do, and an invented device wastes a slide and teaches a false relationship.

The requirement, whichever you choose: the case must be unanswerable from one aspect. If a student can reach a defensible answer using only one, the slide has not done fusion work.

5a. Three structures, three kinds of object

They are not the same kind of thing, and the difference decides what you can put into a cycle and what you have to find already sitting in it.

Stock-and-flow is a representation. The student reads or builds a model, and the coordination is rate against amount — a stubborn confusion in its own right, independent of your content. It can be added to any cycle whose content accumulates.

A compensatory pair is a case set. Two real cases, the same outcome, inverted values on two aspects. Nothing is modeled; the coordination comes from the comparison. It has to be found in your content.

A conflict case is a single case with opposing pulls. It also has to be found.

[This is why nobody, and no skill, can hand you a fusion device for arbitrary content. A representation ports. A case set does not, and a manufactured one teaches a relationship that is not there. If the content carries no compensatory relationship and no genuine conflict case, the honest output is "none, and here is why" written into the teacher note.]

5b. The what-if — evidence, not occasion

A counterfactual asks the student to hold the case, change one aspect, and generate the consequence. She cannot do that without already holding the relation between the aspects. So it does not create coordination. It reveals whether coordination happened.

Moves 7, 8 and 9 are occasions for coordination. The what-if is evidence of it, and the evidence is visible in what she writes rather than inferable from a score. Treat it as a required companion to whichever coordination structure the cycle carries. A fusion slide with no what-if is an occasion you did not read.

Three constraints, and the cycle fails at this without them:

• Individual and written. Moves 8 and 9 may run as group work — high complexity at low exposure is a good pairing. But a group product says nothing about who coordinated, so a group what-if is an empty diagnosis.
• Specify what changes and what is held. "What if there were no decomposers?" leaves the student not knowing how far to go or at what scale. The constrained forms are: how would this differ in this other context, or if I changed this one thing. An unconstrained counterfactual is the polar bear question again, wearing a different hat.
• In biology, hold the mechanism fixed and vary the condition. Open counterfactuals invite teleological reasoning straight back in. "What if snakes had kept their legs?" hands a student reaching for purpose an easy answer. Ask instead what would have happened if the ancestral population had lived in open ground rather than in burrows. Same coordination demand, no invitation to purpose.

6. The Concept Bank

Terms met across separate weeks, brought onto one page so relations between them become visible. Nothing new is introduced. What changes is that a sequence becomes a structure. This is diachronic simultaneity as a built artifact.

The requirement: the page must ask the student to state how two of the terms connect. Co-presence is the precondition, not the achievement. A page that only lists the terms has achieved co-presence and left the relating to chance. Same absence of testing pressure either way — the difference is entirely in the demand.

[This is also the reason review sheets and cumulative tests do not do this work. They attempt diachronic simultaneity and reach only co-presence, because filling a blank exercises retrieval, and retrieval leaves a sequence a sequence.]

7. The teacher note

One slide. Not speaker notes. Deletable in one action if you decide against it.

Seven declarations:

1. The critical aspect, in plain words.
2. What is held invariant, and the statement that the examples differ in one dimension on purpose.
3. What breaks if an example is substituted.
4. What this cycle assumes, and what depends on it.
5. Which slide types appear, and which conditional ones were left out, and why.
6. Which simultaneity this cycle works on — synchronic, diachronic, or both.
7. The visibility rung — for example, "written and private, building toward unattributed read-aloud."

Declaration 7 names a rung. The slide right after this one explains what the five rungs are — see §7c, "The slide that carries this". Ship the pair, or declaration 7 reads as jargon to the one teacher who most needs it.

[Why this is a slide and not a manual entry: a manual is read after compliance is already the frame, if it is read at all. A teacher adapting your deck in good faith, not knowing that three examples differ in exactly one dimension by design, will substitute a better example and destroy the contrast. The note protects the design against helpful improvement. In Marton's terms it protects the intended object of learning as the enacted one changes hands.]

[Why the visibility line in particular is worth writing down, and it is not paperwork. A room at rung 1 or 2 shows quiet students writing. That reads as low engagement against every walkthrough rubric in use, and it is the correct instruction for that room at that time. A cycle that declares its rung converts an absence into a stated design decision. An observer can disagree with a decision. She cannot disagree with an absence, because an absence looks like a failure.]

7b. Enactment — how the question runs in the room

Design is half of it. This is the other half, and it is the part a slide cannot carry on its own.

1. Establish the difference.
2. Ask a multiple-choice question about it. Narrow the possibilities on purpose.
3. Pair talk.
4. Sequential hands-up vote, so you can see who votes for what.
5. Choose the next move from the vote pattern:
   • Split → two students who voted differently justify, then re-vote.
   • Low confidence → more pair talk, vote again on the original question.
   • Confident and wrong → several students justify, to surface what they saw.
6. Widen: why did you choose?

On the vote, and this matters if your students are not there yet. A hands-up vote asks for two things at once: a commitment, and public exposure. In a room where a wrong first answer is not yet safe, the exposure cost dominates and the rational move is to look at nobody. Voting is a capability you build toward, not a technique that works on demand. It is rung 5 of the ladder below, and it is last.

7c. Visibility — the second scale

Visibility runs on its own scale, from lowest to highest: written and private, to a partner, read aloud by the teacher without a name, owned aloud, voted.

Complexity runs on a separate scale: one aspect, a rule, a strained rule, two aspects coordinated, a counterfactual.

Do not lock them together. A high-complexity question is usually easier in a low-visibility form, because the student needs thinking time more than she needs an audience. A vote is low complexity at high visibility, which is why it lands badly early. If visibility rises monotonically across the arc, your highest-exposure moves land on your hardest content, which is the worst pairing available. Raise visibility across the year; reset it low inside each cycle.

The ladder, gated by evidence

The rungs open on what you can observe, not on the week of the year. The mechanism throughout is that the student is gathering evidence about what happens to wrong answers in your room, and she cannot get that evidence from being told.

Rung 1 — written, seen only by you. No precondition beyond not having punished wrongness. The structure is the two-tier response: first answer scored for completion, revision is where thinking counts. Ready for rung 2 when most students write a first answer at all, and some first answers are wrong in interesting ways rather than blank or copied. A blank is a refusal to commit even privately, which means rung 1 is not yet secure.

Rung 2 — written, shown to one assigned partner. Assigned, not chosen. Chosen partners reproduce the existing social order, and the students most at risk choose nobody. Ready for rung 3 when pairs talk about the answer rather than about something else, and at least some students change or extend an answer after talking.

Rung 3 — you read a wrong but productive answer aloud, unattributed, and use it. This is the rung that does the work, and the one no PD teaches. Take a genuinely useful wrong answer from the stack — not a straw man, students detect the difference immediately. Read it without a name. Then use it: build on it, ask what it assumes, put it against a case. Do not correct it and move on. Never signal whose it is, including by looking at them. Four or five instances change what a wrong answer means in that room. Ready for rung 4 when students volunteer answers you did not solicit, or a student says a version of "that was mine" without distress.

Rung 4 — a student owns an answer aloud, by invitation. Privately arranged where you can: "your answer about X is the one I want to start with — will you say it?" It is available because she watched rung 3 and knows what will be done with what she says. Ready for rung 5 when more than a few students speak, disagreement happens between students rather than through you, and a wrong answer aloud does not end that student's participation for the period.

Rung 5 — public simultaneous commitment. The vote, with pair talk, sequential hands, justification, re-vote. Section 7b. Last, not first: it asks for commitment and exposure at once, and it works only where everything above has made the exposure cheap.

Descent. Any of these resets. A new class, a new semester, a hard week, a student who was humiliated somewhere else that day. Drop a rung without announcing it.

[The gates are written as observations rather than as measures on purpose. You can see every one of them from the front of the room in one period, which is the only kind of criterion that gets used. The cost, stated so nobody has to discover it: they are not research instruments and should not be presented as such.]

[Rung 3 resembles revoicing, and it resembles what Lampert does with student work. The difference is that those treat it as a discourse move available whenever it is useful, and this treats it as a scaffold with a position in a sequence and a precondition for what comes after. Say that plainly if anyone asks, or someone who knows revoicing will find you.]

Visibility belongs to the move, not to the lesson

Each move tolerates a different amount of exposure, and the sequence already ramps it — so visibility resets low at the start of every cycle while the ceiling rises across the year. Operate at or below the ceiling, depending on where the room is.

Move 4 is the lowest for a reason: the student's own rule breaks there. If you cold call, this table is what tells you where it is safe. Cold call at move 2 asks a student to pick between two options with a reason for either. Cold call at move 4 asks her to watch her own rule break in front of thirty people. The move, not the technique, is what makes it appropriate.

[Rejected, and recorded so it does not come back: a per-student readiness list. It is real information, and it is also a written record that this student cannot speak in front of the class. It follows her, it becomes a lens, and Cohen's status finding is precisely that expectations become self-confirming. A list is an expectation written down. Track by move instead — "the move 2 read-aloud is working; nobody yet owns an answer at move 4" — which tells you what to do next without classifying anyone. Individual knowledge stays where it already is: in your head, and in a private invitation.]

Group work

Group work is a visibility reducer, not a rung. A student speaks to three people instead of thirty and the product carries the group's name. That is most of why a class likes it, and it is not a bad reason.

The lever: group work carries higher complexity than the room's whole-class rung allows. Moves 8 and 9 can run in groups early. You do not need rung 4 to ask a hard question — you need rung 4 to ask it in front of everyone.

The trap: a group product says nothing about who coordinated. It can be complete and correct with one student having done the relating and three having watched. So group work is a good occasion for coordination and useless as evidence of it, which is exactly why the what-if is individual and written.

Two things to watch, and to put in the teacher note if they apply:

• Cohen's status finding operates inside groups, not only across the class. The student who does not speak in class often does not speak in the group either, and the product conceals it. Rotating roles helps only if the role has real content.
• A class can enjoy group work indefinitely without moving up, because a group is a place to be quiet in. If group work is your main mode, rung 3 still has to happen separately, on individual written answers, or rung 4 never opens.

[A class that has taken to group work is telling you rung 2 is secure. They are getting something from a partner's thinking, which is the precondition for rung 3.]

The written first answer with a rewrite is the low-visibility form of commitment. It gets you the student's real thinking in rooms where a vote would produce silence.

The slide that carries this (added 2026-08-29)

The ladder above goes into the deck as one slide, immediately after the teacher note. The note declares the rung this cycle is built for; that slide says what the rungs are. Build it in that order and the declaration is read first and the slide answers it. Build it the other way round — the ladder at slide 2, in front of the note — and it is a glossary standing in front of a term nobody has met.

It is teacher-facing and never projected. Put the string do not project in its kicker. That is not decoration: it is the string the linter and the grader both test before they classify anything as a diagnostic slide, so it is what keeps a teacher slide out of the count of slides students are scored on.

What goes on it. All five rungs, each with what you actually do and the observable thing that opens the next one. Give rung 3 the most room — it is the rung that does the work. Then descent, and the fact that group work is a visibility reducer rather than a rung. Then the per-move ceilings, which is what tells you where cold call is safe.

One trap, and it will bite you. The move names are also the marker strings the teacher prompts match on, anywhere in the deck. Write "Pattern Break" plainly on this slide and your deck now reports two Pattern Breaks where it has one. Write the names so a reader sees no difference and a matcher sees no marker: Pattern-Break, Build-a-Rule, What-if, and Critical Aspect question with no colon after "aspect". Count the marker strings before and after you add the slide; every count must be unchanged.

It fits on one slide, but only just. Arial 11pt in a single full-width column. Measure the copy against the box before you ship it — at 12pt this text runs off the bottom, and the check that finds that is a measurement, not a glance.

scripts/deck_apply_changes.py holds the copy and inserts the slide. Take it from there rather than retyping it; the wording is the same on every deck in the arc. Its absence is an advisory in deck_lint.py, never a hard failure.

8. Format

4:3. Arial. Defined palette. White background. Clone slide types from a reference build rather than styling by hand — a cloned slide keeps its sizes, colors, and positions, so a deck built this way cannot drift.

9. Before you teach it

• Every example in a contrast set differs in exactly one dimension.
• The Critical Aspect question carries a difference in its own text — a comparison, named alternatives, or a stated change condition.
• The Pattern Break actually strains the rule the Build a Rule slide produces.
• The fusion case cannot be answered from one aspect.
• The what-if is individual and written, and it names what changes and what is held.
• The Concept Bank asks the student to state how two terms connect. A page that only lists terms does not pass this.
• The teacher note names what breaks on substitution.
• The teacher note declares which simultaneity the cycle works on.
• The teacher note declares the visibility rung.
• Links resolve.

10. What this is for

Two aspects at once is the demand on a student. Content, this student, this class, and the design at once is the demand on you, in about two seconds, several times a period. The structure here is meant to be settled in advance so your attention is free for the part no skill can specify.