Bloom’s Taxonomy and Activities
Bloom’s Taxonomy is an excellent basis for activities, allowing you to construct tasks for your learners that closely match their current level of mastery as well as helping them to progress to a higher level in relation to whatever content you are teaching.
Activities are the building blocks of lessons.
Along with the content we want learners to learn about, they are the key element on which our teaching rests.
Thought of in this way, we find ourselves with vessels (activities) into which we place content.
Many excellent activities exist.
Some are subject- or topic-specific, others suitable for use across the curriculum.
All these remain similar in the sense that they ask learners to do certain things with the lesson content.
If we’re using Bloom’s, this doing is cognitive in basis.
(Remember that Bloom’s is the taxonomy of the cognitive domain. If you’re teaching a practical subject or a practical area of the curriculum, Bloom’s has less relevance. So too with maths, to some extent, and modern foreign languages when teaching it at lower levels.)
Put another way, activities ask learners to use different cognitive processes to interact with lesson content.
As such, they are closely connected to the taxonomy.
A teacher may be aware of this or they may not.
In the former case, we can imagine them planning a series of activities and recognising that these ask learners to think in different ways but not necessarily being familiar with the hierarchy of mastery defined by the taxonomy.
This point intimates that having a good working knowledge of the taxonomy is helpful when it comes to developing, applying and sequencing activities.
Using the Taxonomy as a Guide
As a reminder, here’s the taxonomy in full:
- Level 1: Knowledge
- Level 2: Comprehension
- Level 3: Application
- Level 4: Analysis
- Level 5: Synthesis
- Level 6: Evaluation
(Subsequent research has suggested swapping the top two levels. Personally, I don’t think it makes much difference. These are always the most challenging processes and whether one or the other is most challenging tends to depend on context.)
If we know how the taxonomy works and appreciate the varying cognitive demands made by the different levels, then we are better placed to bend activities to our will, as opposed to using them without quite such a clear sense of purpose.
For example, it might be that one teacher plans a series of activities that they can see through their own analysis causes learners to think increasingly critically about the topic of recycling.
A second teacher, with a sound understanding of the taxonomy, can match these achievements but do so more quickly and with a greater sense of certainty, given their knowledge of how and why to apply the taxonomy for this particular purpose.
To put it another way, you don’t have to understand the taxonomy to plan successful activities, but it helps.
Taking this point about speed, we can note two specific ways in which familiarity allows us to plan quickly and effectively.
First, we do not need to spend a great deal of time trying to work out a series of activities that are progressively more challenging.
We can simply turn to the taxonomy for our framework.
Second, if we devise an activity and are uncertain as to the relative level of challenge it promotes, we need not agonise.
Instead, we can compare it to the taxonomy, make a judgement and, if necessary, alter it.
Speeding Up Your Planning
Here is an example of how we might plan quickly and effectively.
Having settled on a learning objective and a series of learning outcomes, we continue our planning by writing down a formulation like the following:
- Starter: Knowledge
- First Activity: Comprehension
- Second Activity: Application
- Third Activity: Analysis/Evaluation
- Plenary: Reflection
In but a moment we have a progressive, challenging framework for our lesson that helps us push learner thinking across the board.
Another option we might choose to use is:
- Starter: Knowledge/Comprehension
- First Activity: Knowledge/Comprehension/Application
- Second Activity: Comprehension/Application/Analysis
- Third Activity: Application/Analysis/Synthesis
- Plenary: Reflection
This reflects a different formulation, where we seek to give opportunities to work towards multiple outcomes in all sections of the lesson.
Either of these approaches gives us a skeleton for our lessons, one we can use as the basis for learners learning about and interacting with the relevant content.
This happens via the activities we choose for each stage.
A final point to note in this overview is that there may be occasions, particularly when first introducing a topic, where we need to spend longer on the lower levels of the taxonomy.
In science, for example, it may be necessary that learners know and comprehend a large amount of content before they can apply it.
In such situations, we can still call on a swiftly expressed Bloom’s-based framework.
The only difference will be that we do not seek to scale multiple levels in a single lesson, instead choosing to do this over the course of a few lessons, due to the nature of the content.
I mention this here because it is a situation with which many of us will be familiar, as well as because it represents a corrective to the view, which might have been implied, that the two outlines I suggest above are suitable for all lessons.
Certainly, they are suitable for many, but I openly acknowledge this does not mean they are suitable for all.
Nonetheless, the point remains that thinking about lesson structure from the perspective of the taxonomy allows for quick sketching of the outline of a lesson, as well as an increased certainty about the progressive nature of that sketch, and a sense of confidence about the direction in which each activity ought to take the learning.
