The easiest way to use Bloom’s Taxonomy to plan objectives that drive learning forward and put challenge at the top of the agenda for all learners

Objectives and Outcomes – A Brief Overview

Objectives and outcomes underpin lessons.

When planning, you may choose to begin by defining them or you may prefer to plan the lesson first and then codify them.

Either approach is reasonable.

In the first case, the objectives and outcomes provide a starting point from which we can move off.

In the second case, we have a loose idea of them in our minds but only fully define this when we have finished putting the lesson together.

Learning objectives are the purpose of our lessons.

They are the goal.

This is what an objective is: something we want to achieve.

By having an objective, we have something guiding our lesson and, as a result, the learning we seek to facilitate.

Learning outcomes are the things we want our learners to be able to do by the end of the lesson.

The extent to which they can do them demonstrates the extent to which they have achieved the objective.

This is why teachers sometimes plan using multiple outcomes, sometimes in the formulation:

All will be able to…
Most will be able to…
Some will be able to…

(Though this approach has disadvantages as well as benefits.)

Here we see that outcomes can take account of the different rates of progress learners in our class are likely to make.

While we would prefer all learners to fully achieve the learning objective, this is often unrealistic.

Progress is about travelling from a starting point, not about all learners achieving exactly the same.

We must be pragmatic.

So, we have objectives to give our lessons purpose, and we have outcomes to define what achieving that purpose will look like, to greater or lesser extents.

The first is the goal, the second are the ways in which the goal is met.

Sharing objectives and outcomes with learners opens up success criteria.

It helps them gain a clear understanding of what they need to do to be successful.

For example, we might explain the learning objective to learners at the start of the lesson and then refer to this in a mid-lesson review and again in the plenary, giving them the chance to assess, on each occasion, how close they are to achieving it.

Similarly, we might show learners what outcomes we expect them to achieve by the end of the lesson.

This could be in the form of a written description displayed on the board, or through a piece of exemplar work used as a model.

We can see how, in both these examples, we are giving learners access to information that makes it easier for them to understand what success entails.

By opening up the criteria internal to the lesson, we give learners a better chance of meeting or surpassing those criteria.

Alternative Approaches

Alternative approaches do exist, however.

The first of these is to turn the objective and the outcomes into a series of questions, as opposed to a series of statements.

Doing this can make the content more accessible and promotes a general sense of enquiry.

This is because there is an emphasis on the idea that the purpose of the lesson is to reach a point where the various questions can be answered successfully, which is tangibly different from working towards being able to match or surpass a set of statements.

Another option is to construct objectives and outcomes in negotiation with learners.

The benefit here is that learners can feel more engaged in the lesson and, as a result, more motivated to pursue the path to mastery which you as the teacher advocate.

Two potential problems are that learners may struggle to articulate suitable objectives and outcomes and that what they suggest may not accord with the teacher’s wider aims.

Here it is worth returning to the earlier sentence, where we used the word ‘negotiation.’

Thinking about the process in this way helps remind us that neither problem is insurmountable.

Overall, objectives and outcomes give structure to our lessons, purpose to our endeavours and concrete reference points against which to judge the learning that learners do.

While they can be formulated in multiple ways, these points remain.

With these basic arguments established, we can now look at how we apply Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Creating Challenging Objectives

Maximising progress is one of the central goals of teaching.

It encompasses raising achievement and giving learners the best possible opportunities to learn and develop.

If we set learning objectives that are too easy or too simple, achieving this becomes difficult.

Learners will be faced with low expectations and will know, whether consciously or not, that what they need to do to be successful is not particularly demanding.

With objectives that are too easy, there is little or no chance of learners rising to a challenge and making better progress than they believed themselves capable of.

This means that, if we want to teach as well as possible, we need to set challenging learning objectives and do so at all times.

That is, objectives that require effort, application and careful thinking if they are to be achieved.

Bloom’s Taxonomy lends itself to such an aim.

We can call on the top three levels – analysis, synthesis and evaluation – in most situations to develop suitably challenging objectives.

Remember, the taxonomy is a hierarchy of mastery:

Level 1: Knowledge
Level 2: Comprehension
Level 3: Application
Level 4: Analysis
Level 5: Synthesis
Level 6: Evaluation

Each level is more challenging than the last.

Analysis, synthesis and evaluation are the most challenging levels.

Hence, they give us scope for developing challenging objectives.

The process is simple.

Take the following set of keywords and select one that fits with the lesson you are planning.

Then use it as the basis of your objective.

Analysis:

Analyse, Appraise, Categorize, Compare, Contrast, Differentiate, Discriminate, Distinguish, Examine, Experiment, Explore, Investigate, Question, Research, Test.

Synthesis:

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

Evaluation:

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

Example Learning Objectives to Consider

Here are some examples:

LO: To assess the arguments for and against the use of proportional representation
LO: To create an alternative ending to the story of Little Red Riding Hood
LO: To investigate the most effective way to limit coastal erosion

In each case we have a combination of content and process.

The process is that defined by the keyword taken from the taxonomy while the content is the information with which the lesson is concerned.

We are using the keywords to create a statement describing what we want learners to be able to do, cognitively, with the content we are teaching.

These exemplar objectives compare favourably to any we could construct using the lower levels of the taxonomy:

LO: To be able to recall the arguments for and against the use of proportional representation
LO: To understand the story of Little Red Riding Hood
LO: To show how coastal erosion could be limited by human intervention

Here we see the far lower level of challenge inherent to such objectives.

What is more, what these objectives are asking learners to do is in fact implicit within the original, more challenging set we provided.

For example, we cannot assess the arguments for and against the use of proportional representation unless we can first recall them.

Similarly, we cannot create a different ending for Little Red Riding Hood unless we first understand the story.

This takes us back to the argument that the higher levels of the taxonomy rest on the lower levels.

Mastery comes from a building up of skill.

This begins with basic foundations and goes from there.

Challenging objectives based on the top three levels will take care of the simpler cognitive processes at the same time as they push learners to think more deeply about the lesson content.

You can’t plan a lesson that successfully meets a challenging objective, unless you have accounted for the prerequisite knowledge and understanding.

Turning Objectives into Questions

We can also use the taxonomy keywords to create learning objectives in the form of questions.

Here are the three from above reworked accordingly:

LO: Are the arguments for proportional representation more persuasive than the ones against?
LO: How else might the story of Little Red Riding Hood turn out?
LO: Is it possible to effectively limit coastal erosion?

Immediately we can see a difference.

In these question-based formulations, the keywords have disappeared.

This reflects the nature and structure of questions, as well as the way in which we have tried to form these particular ones to make them engaging for learners.

I flag up the point for one reason in particular.

When getting used to applying the taxonomy for the purpose of creating question-style objectives, you might like to begin by developing statement-style objectives which you then turn into questions.

This way, you can be sure that your questions are closely tied to the level of the taxonomy for which you are aiming.

This process has been exemplified above.

First, I came up with three learning objectives in statement form, using keywords from the taxonomy.

Then I modified these, so they were in the form of questions, with these questions closely mirroring the aims of the original objectives.

Let’s put the objectives side-by-side to illustrate:

LO: Are the arguments for proportional representation more persuasive than the ones against?
LO: To assess the arguments for and against the use of proportional representation

LO: How else might the story of Little Red Riding Hood turn out?
LO: To create an alternative ending to the story of Little Red Riding Hood

LO: Is it possible to effectively limit coastal erosion?
LO: To investigate the most effective way to limit coastal erosion

This comparison clearly demonstrates the differences between the two types of learning objective.

They frame the lesson in different ways and make subtly different demands of learners.

They also imply different purposes, with the questions focussing more on enquiry than the statements.

All these points are worth considering when deciding what types of objectives you want to use in your planning.