How expert teachers use Bloom’s Taxonomy as their go-to teaching tool for facilitating challenge (unless they only teach practical areas of the curriculum)

Challenge in the Classroom

Let’s think about challenge and, specifically, how Bloom’s Taxonomy helps teachers to facilitate it.

Challenge means that learners are being asked to do more than they are currently able to do.

It means they are facing greater demands on their cognitive capacities than if they were able to switch off and glide through a lesson without really exerting themselves.

It means that the teacher has considered what current level of skill, knowledge and understanding learners possess, and then considered how they could push them to develop this.

If we are being challenged, it means we are working at or near the edge of our abilities.

It is through this that we come to push back the frontier of what we can do, enlarging the scope of our powers.

Challenge is thus intimately tied up with both trial and error and mistake-making.

After all, if we are trying to do something we cannot yet do, it is highly likely that we will make mistakes along the way.

Indeed, we will need to make mistakes if we want to learn enough to take us forward (and, we could argue, a challenge is not enough of a challenge if we can meet it quickly and with relatively little error).

Great teaching sees the teacher maintaining a high level of challenge across their lessons.

Doing this means learners learn more and make better progress.

They push back the boundary of what they can do with greater speed.

(And possibly with greater discomfort. After all, being challenged means you are, by necessity, out of your comfort zone.)

Yet this is not easy.

For one thing, finding the means through which to keep stretching the thinking of the learners we teach is time-consuming and intellectually demanding.

For another, maintaining a consistently accurate knowledge of where our learners are at in terms of their understanding (and what we need to do if we are to challenge them) requires rigorous elicitation and analysis of information about learning.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a tool which, through its application, allows us to circumvent both these problems.

(The caveat here is that Bloom’s Taxonomy is a taxonomy of the cognitive domain. If you are teaching a practical subject, maths or modern foreign languages, things are different. Bloom’s may fit, it may fit in part, or it may not fit at all.)

Stretching Thinking

We can begin by considering how we go about stretching learners’ thinking.

Trying to produce new strategies on a regular basis is hard.

Developing your own suite of techniques isn’t easy.

But the taxonomy provides us with everything we need in an easy-to-use, ready-to-apply format.

Each level of the taxonomy is more intellectually challenging than the last:

Knowledge
Comprehension
Application
Analysis
Synthesis
Evaluation

Even if we take synthesis and evaluation as being on the same level (some argue they are, others argue they should be swapped over), it still stands that these two processes are more complex than analysis, which is more complex than application and so on.

Any time we find ourselves in a situation where we want to stretch and challenge our learners’ thinking, we can turn to the taxonomy for help.

Heading to the top two levels, we find a range of synonyms we can use as the basis of questions or tasks:

Synthesis Keywords:

Combine, Compose, Construct, Create, Devise, Design, Formulate, Hypothesise, Integrate, Merge, Organise, Plan, Propose, Synthesise, Unite.

Evaluation Keywords:

Appraise, Argue, Assess, Critique, Defend, Evaluate, Examine, Grade, Inspect, Judge, Justify, Rank, Rate, Review, Value.

That these will be challenging is obvious.

They represent the most complex of the cognitive processes.

And, therefore, ask learners to engage in more challenging cognitive work than anything else.

Of course, it may be that challenge for one learner is different from challenge for another learner.

This is not an issue, though.

If, for example, we pose a challenging evaluation question to a particular learner and it quickly becomes apparent that this is a step too far, we can scale back and pose an analytical question instead.

We know this is simpler, yet still challenging, because we know how the taxonomy works.

It gives us certainty.

A framework to which we can always return.

One that does the work for us.

Making our lives easier.

Familiarity with the taxonomy means we have a superb tool on hand we can use to modify, adapt, and alter our questions or tasks, based on the information we get back from learners.

Finding the challenge sweet spot becomes easier.

Understanding Where Learners Are At

Coming now to the second point, regarding the need to consistently understand where learners are at and therefore what constitutes a challenge for them, we again find the taxonomy to be of use again.

This was intimated above, when we looked at how to scale back challenge based on the response we receive, moving down the levels of the taxonomy if required.

(When we switched our questioning from evaluation to analysis.)

The opposite applies as well.

If we plan an activity based around comprehension and quickly see that most learners are racing through it more quickly than we expected, we simply turn to the taxonomy and introduce a sub-task or challenge question based on application and/or analysis.

Immediately, the level of challenge goes up, with little effort required on our part.

And this comes in direct response to the information we elicited about learners’ current understanding.

Using Bloom’s-Based Questioning to Diagnose

Our final point here concerns diagnosis.

Diagnosis of learning.

Of where learners are at.

Questioning is one of the primary ways we access what learners know and understand.

During a lesson, we can test and probe understanding by asking questions based on the various levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Doing this helps us assess the extent of that understanding and to identify the point in the taxonomy learners have reached, in relation to the content.

It might be that they are straddling two levels, or even that they are demonstrating proficiency at one level in relation to one aspect of the content but not the other aspects.

Whatever we find – whether it indicates a uniform level of understanding or not – we can use this information as the basis for our subsequent interventions which, once again, are predicated on an application of the taxonomy.

So, for example, we might ask a middle-ability learner a series of application and analysis questions.

This reveals that they have fully comprehended the lesson content and are well-placed to use this to problem-solve.

Armed with such knowledge, we know that the next step for us is to set the learner up with a creative or evaluative task.

The next level of challenge.

Neatly tailored to where they are currently at.

Again, we see Bloom’s Taxonomy at work.

Making our lives easier.

And helping us find the appropriate level of challenge for the learner who is in front of us.