Bloom’s Taxonomy: Creativity and 21st Century Literacy

Innovation requires both a strong foundation in content knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge in new ways – usually across a variety of disciplines. And it requires using all of Bloom’s skills from remembering through creating. Creating is not a skill limited to the gifted. It’s something that all students can do – think of it as a new combination of old elements.

Digital technology gives students access to information and creative tools that enable them to be creators as well as consumers of content. New technologies have put students in charge of the information they access, store, analyze and share. You can’t broadcast (lecture) at students.  They won’t be a passive audience. They expect information control and functionality. 

For more, I recommend a site from Andrew Churches, a New Zealand educator who matches Bloom’s Taxonomy with instructional technology to move students from lower to higher order thinking skills. 

K-12 Walk Throughs Foster Teacher Reflection

Rigor and Relevance Walkthrough
Rigor and Relevance Walkthrough

I recently conducted walk through training (WT) at Hood River County School District in Oregon. I thought the model we used was very effective at engaging teachers and administrators in reflective discussion on instructional practice.

In February, I did half-day presentations on Rigor, Relevance and Literacy to Hood River’s K-5 and 6-12 faculties. In April, I led teams on WTs to give them on opportunity to hone their observational skills. It’s one thing to talk about rigor and relevance in a workshop. It’s another to go into a classroom and try to decide the level of Bloom’s taxonomy being used by the students.

Observers were not in classrooms to evaluate teachers or instructional strategies, but to test their observational skills and have an opportunity to dialogue about their conclusions. We used this simple form to guide our efforts and keep our focus on observation, reflection and discussion. R-R-guide2.pdf  16kb pdf

One day was devoted to K-12 administrative and TOSAs. The next two days were spent with K-12 teacher teams. Each day we began with an orientation session. The team started doing WT’s at an elementary building, then moved to middle and finally, high school. We only visited teachers who had volunteered to host our team. At each building we met periodically to process what we had seen.

The most powerful element of the day, was the K-12 settings of the WTs and the use of K-12 teacher teams. Teachers seldom see other classes in action and it rare that a high school teacher would be given a chance to observe an elementary class or vice versa.  All the participants agreed it was a very valuable experience and they came away with greater respect for the contributions being made all each levels of the program. Most importantly, they became more skillful at assessing the rigor and relevance of a variety of instructional strategies. They were then able to apply those perspectives to their own instructional practice.  The district intends to support teachers in collegial observation and peer reflection.

For an updated guide for how to conduct classroom walkthoughs see my post: Teacher-Led Professional Development: Eleven Reasons Why You Should be Using Classroom Walk Throughs

Students Can Become Proficient Writers – Try a QuickWrite

The recently released NAEP report suggests that only about one-third of our eighth graders and about one-quarter of the nation’s high school seniors are proficient writers. The results are not much better than the results of the NAEP’s last report in 2002. More

If we want to bring these numbers up, students should be writing on a daily basis in all of their classes. So how do we give students more opportunities to hone their writing skills without overburdening our secondary teachers with loads of papers to grade?

Why not use the QuickWrite strategy.

  • As students enter class, they see a prompt on the front board that requires them to revisit a previously lesson. This makes more productive use of the opening minutes of class where teachers are usually tied up in “housekeeping” tasks.
  • Students are trained to write briefly, but in complete sentences.
  • After five minutes, selected students read their answers aloud to the class. Students are instructed to read exactly what they have written. This requires quick organization of thoughts and prevents rambling oral replies.

The QuickWrite is followed by short discussion. Teachers call on volunteers, drawing out divergent viewpoint:

  • “Does anyone have a different idea?”
  • “How did those two students’ QuickWrites differ?”
  • “What do these QuickWrites tell us we should study today?”

This strategy stimulates students’ higher-order thinking about a concept from the previous day. Teachers can easily check for understanding before beginning a new lesson. The class is now ready to link this newly anchored understanding to the content of the upcoming class. 

Most importantly, a QuickWrite gives students a chance to evaluate what they think is significant and share what they’ve learned with their peers. It restructures the typical teacher-led discussion that too often finds the teacher playing “guess what I’m thinking?”

For more ideas and resources, visit my literacy posts on this blog.

Strategic Thinking In Social Studies: Rigor, Relevance and Literacy

The Texas Social Studies Supervisors Association held its 2008 Spring Conference March 27-28, 2008 at the Hilton Austin Airport. I gave the keynote address on the 28th.  Participants requested that I post a PDF download of my notes. Here it is – Keynote.pdf 2.5MB pdf  Other conference sessions  included content and strategies designed to:

  • Alternative strategies for dealing with TAKS failures
  • Strategies for teaching students from a poverty background
  • Reading in the content area
  • Integrating primary sources
  • Strategies for teaching English language learners
  • Closing the achievement gap
  • Project-based learning
  • Revising the TEKS
  • Implementing technology in the social studies classroom
  • Pre-AP and AP social studies
  • Building academic vocabulary in social studies

Students Doing History Beats Test Prep

Over the next two weeks I'll be doing presentations that take me back to my roots as a history teacher. I'll be giving the keynote at the Texas Social Studies Supervisors Association spring conference in Austin and giving a workshop for elementary school teachers in the Rochester (NY) City School District.

In both talks I'll show how history and social studies can be used to teach literacy, numeracy and critical thinking. No need to cut back on social studies instructional time to send struggling students for "mind numbing" test prep in reading and math. It begins when teachers provide students with the historical material that kids use to "do the history."  Let's look at two examples – click photos to enlarge

Goldenspike_2 First, a famous photo of the "golden spike" – the final ceremonial spike driven to mark the completion of a transcontinental railroad line in 1869. What can a student learn by looking at the image? Not much, because the important information is not in the image. It's in the background knowledge a student must already possess to interpret it. Unfortunately, this type of photograph dominates our textbooks. It's iconic – it refers to something else that we want students to know.

In contrast, here's a photograph of a city street in Rochester NY at the turn of the last century. Stonestreet_3 With very little background information, students can use the photo to do history and interpret the impact of transportation technologies and the pace of change. Then the student could write a "first person account" from the point of view of someone in the photo. They could even go on to design their own comparison of the changes in communication technology in their world today. Perhaps include a graph showing the growth of cell phones vs land lines?

We can design the learning to help our students be the historian. It begins when we allow students to make their own judgments about source material and share what's important to them (instead of just repeating the details the teacher highlights). They'll develop their literacy and numeracy skills for a more authentic audience and purpose as they share their thinking with those around them.