Organize Your Classes with Bloom’s Taxonomy

How we learn the latest news and trends pass by in the blink of an eye. However, teachers must relate the concepts taught in class with current events for some school subjects to reinforce their students’ knowledge. That is why teachers need tools that facilitate the organization of their courses by allowing them to conceive and modify content quickly.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a pedagogical model created by the American educator and psychologist Benjamin Bloom in the 1950s. Although it may seem that his model is now obsolete, it continues to be an essential guideline for many teachers at all school levels worldwide. It describes the cognitive, emotional, and psychomotor areas throughout people’s learning.

However, this article will only focus on the cognitive field, which is the most popular among teachers. It serves as a visual guide to group the necessary elements for students’ effective learning and critical thinking skills. It also helps facilitators structure their lessons, tasks, and projects.

In the 1990s, Loris Andersen, a student of Bloom, made slight but significant revisions to update the hierarchy diagram, which is discussed below:

– Remember: At the pyramid’s base is the “Remember” level, where theoretical explanations, definitions of concepts, the memorization of structures and methodologies, etc., are considered. Students must understand to remember the elements of a topic to expand their knowledge so they can ascend to the following levels of the pyramid. Some activities of this base level are:

• Recalling information from a lecture or paper.
• Listing down several concepts.
• Recognizing main ideas.

After this level, Bloom considers the following stages to consist of competencies and skills. The acquisition of knowledge, which can occur passively, tests students’ skills because their contributions from this level onwards will be based not only on the concepts learned previously but also on their reasoning and critical thinking.

– Understand: Refers to comprehending the subject after having studied the theory. At this tier, students can construct meaning from acquired knowledge through practices such as exemplification, concept classification, and being able to explain topics in their own words.

• Building a conceptual map.
• Writing a summary.
• Discussing a topic with a classmate.

– Apply: At this level, students incorporate knowledge or methodologies to solve problems in fictitious environments or daily life. They recognize concepts and can apply them in new scenarios.

• Solving a mathematical problem using formulas.
• Implementing new drawing techniques.
• Solving problems based on concepts learned.

-Analyze: This refers to students’ ability to separate elements and disseminate information piece by piece to give new meanings to concepts. They recognize how the parts interrelate and can organize, integrate, and attribute the components, among other things.

• Discussing a topic in depth.
• Comparing and contrasting.
• Inferring the consequences of a situation.

– Evaluate: Students can gather, criticize, and judge all the information reasonably and create new structures to reach different results.

• Criticizing a country’s political situation.
• Formulating a hypothesis and corroborating its veracity.
• Combining concepts to come up with a solution.

– Create: At the highest level, students are responsible for reformulating all the information learned to create, plan, and produce something new from the acquired knowledge. The highest tier represents students’ elevation of reasoning, retention, and creativity to do or create something new based on their expertise and criteria.

• Composing a critical essay.
• Developing an innovative solution to a problem of daily life.
• Creating an advertising campaign proposal.

Below is an illustration exemplifying how a theme (Mexico’s Independence) ascends through the pyramid, starting from indications and questions, satisfying the characteristics and requirements of each level:

From simple to complex, this framework is a graphical guide for teachers who can visualize the steps to plan their lessons and, over time, help their students achieve complex thinking abilities through different activities as they level upward.

Organizing a study plan is essential not only so teachers have control and security over what they will be teaching every day but also so they can trace the trajectory of their subject through the design of classes, tasks, and projects that will enrich their students’ learning experience. It allows everyone in the classroom to align with the proposed learning objectives so students will know what will be expected from them.

Translated by Daniel Wetta

Mariana Sofía Jiménez Nájera

Share

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0