Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Bloom's Taxonomy....What in this world????

As part of our school's professional development and our AISI project (Alberta Initiative for School Improvement), our staff is going forward with a school goal to create 21st century learners. One method we are using to do this is to promote higher order thinking skills by using Bloom's Taxonomy.
There are six hierarchal levels, you must start at knowledge, then to comprehension, then to application and on to anaylsis, synthesis and evaluation/create. The levels at the beginning (knowledge and comprehension) are considered the easiest levels. Some argue that many teachers teach to these bottom levels. In our school, we are being challenged to go further up on this pyramid of learning, thus promoting higher thinking skills in our students.

As a staff, we have been divided into groups for each of the cognitive domains of Bloom's Taxonomy and my group is at the top of the pyramid (evaluation/create). My group includes myself, our Gr. 4 teacher, and two jr/sr high teachers. I am going to document each step of Bloom's domains, both to further my knowledge and to provide a portion of a presentation for our whole staff.
I have chosen language arts to focus my lessons on....
KNOWLEDGE
First we must identify our letter person (Mr.C) and be able to recall this letter in numerous situations. We meet him, discuss him, figure out where he comes in the alphabet, discuss his sound then cut him out, glue him in our ABC books and color him. He is then placed on our "Sound Farm" to be utilized in further activites.



COMPREHENSION
Next, we need to know if the student understands what Mr.C's purpose is. How and why is the letter used. We compare sounds and determine beginning letter sounds, we then use our knowledge to print letter C in addition to letters we have already learned about.

1 comment:

TupperMomma said...

I've got chills, I'm so excited for what this will mean for Connor and all of the other young minds that go through our wonderful school!!