Use Bloom’s Taxonomy to create independence for your learners and give them the freedom to embrace challenge (and enjoy the experience)

Using Project Work to Stretch and Challenge Your Learners

Project work is where we give learners an independent task to complete as they see fit, usually over an extended period.

You can use this as a challenge supplement, based around Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Something to add onto your lessons and use as a tool to stretch and challenge your more-able learners (and possibly other learners as well).

This involves giving learners a project to which they can continually return, every time they complete the main activity you have set for the whole class.

For example, we might set our more-able Year 6 learners a project in which they have to produce a detailed guide to a topic of their choosing, with this being caveated by a series of success criteria designed to keep them focussed on producing high-quality work.

In this situation, our most-able learners can return to their project work whenever they finish a main activity and stretch their thinking as a result.

Over time, they produce an extended piece of work that reflects their interest in whichever topic they have chosen.

Open-Ended, Independent Learning

The key features of project work are that it is open-ended, independent and, generally, thematic.

Because it requires learners to think in depth and at length about a particular topic or area, it necessarily promotes analytical, creative and critical thinking, placing it in line with the top of three levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy:

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

In addition, if we give such work to our more-able learners, leaving them free to make choices about what they study and how they study this, they will be naturally inclined to engage with information and ideas at a reasonably high level.

This is for two reasons.

First, the independent and open-ended nature of project work is motivating.

If learners are motivated, they are more likely to push the limits of their thinking and pursue what they are doing to a point of challenge.

Second, the project will come to lack meaning for the learners in question if the thinking they do remains at too concrete a level.

This may be a starting point, but they will have to push beyond it if they really want to grasp hold of the material.

Having been given choice and ownership over the project, it is highly likely that learners will want to do this.

When providing success criteria to structure project work, it is always worth referring to the taxonomy.

This means you can ensure learners are directed to think increasingly deeply about the material in question.

A simple approach is to provide five success criteria, basing these respectively on comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

Another option is to go for three success criteria (which some learners will find more manageable) and to base these on some combination of the five categories mentioned (while maintaining a bias towards the higher levels).

A final point to note is that much project work is inherently creative.

This is because it sets learners a general task and then invites them to decide how best to meet this challenge.

As we know, creative thinking is near the top of the taxonomy, in the form of synthesis.

Hence, we have another reason as to why project work stretches and challenges learners’ thinking.

Creative Independence

Let us stay on this theme of creativity by turning to the general idea of creative independence.

This, we might say, characterises people like artists, musicians, scientists and writers, among others, who are at the top of their field.

It reflects the fact that these individuals have reached a point from which development has become their own end to shape.

They have achieved mastery and moved beyond it.

Consider, for example, an artist like Henri Matisse.

His fame and regard stems not just from his mastery of technique, but so too from the manner in which he took that mastery and used it to explore and develop new avenues of form and representation.

Creative independence is highly valued in our society, as well as being highly challenging.

We can include elements in our lessons that encourage creative independence.

These will stretch and challenge learners, particularly the more-able.

Here are three examples of how to do this.

Creative Independence Strategy 1: Start with Synthesis Keywords

Use a set of synthesis keywords as the starting point for constructing tasks or questions that give learners scope to be creative on their own terms:

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

This is a step beyond the project work outlined above.

Here, our aim is to deliberately foster a sense of freedom and lack of structure (whereas in that example our aim was to foster freedom with a structure).

For example, we might ask learners to create, design or plan something new.

Or we might ask them to try to solve a problem, suggest an alternative, or sketch a different way of doing something.

But we then leave the task open and let learners decide what success looks like.

You can use tasks of this type as extensions, or as something that learners return to repeatedly.

For example, over the course of a week in a primary school, or across a term in a secondary school.

Creative Independence Strategy 2: Creative Failure

Challenge learners to engage creatively with the lesson content but to do so with the intention of failing.

This takes us back to the idea of trial and error along with the feedback loop that comes from failing, analysing what went wrong, and then trying again.

To do this, you can look to the synthesis keywords as a starting point for constructing tasks or questions.

Beyond this, however, you should also explain to learners that success will not be measured by the finished products they create, but by the number of failures they come up with and what they learn from each one.

We are turning learner expectations upside down to encourage a new, more challenging way of thinking.

One based on creative independence.

You can use this approach with the whole class, or specifically with your more-able learners.

If the latter, think about how you can structure an extension task so that it gives learners license to think creatively and to fail with purpose.

For example, a design and technology teacher might challenge a more-able learner to design a bridge that is both robust and beautiful to look at.

This open-ended, creative task will inevitably involve trial and error – creative failure – as the learner works through iterations in their efforts to meet the brief.

Creative Independence Strategy 3: Take Off the Shackles

Remove the shackles.

During whole-class activities, work with your more-able learners to quickly assess that they have grasped the main ideas, then give them the freedom to take the learning in a direction that interests them.

Do this by engaging in a brief, speculative discussion about how the lesson content might connect to other areas of knowledge, or what new areas of knowledge it might give access to.

Encourage learners to come to some form of conclusion through the discussion – a question, task or problem that can animate their thinking – and then leave them to pursue this under their own steam.

For example, if you’ve been learning about river deltas, could this open up the possibility of exploring how humans have used river deltas, or lived alongside them, in different time periods?

Having this discussion with a more-able learner might then lead to them formulating a question they want to pursue, around the idea of river deltas being a potential location for humans to live.