Mastering Bloom's Taxonomy-The Ultimate Guide for Teachers

In the early 1940’s, Benjamin Bloom, an American educational psychologist identified  a pressing need for educational objectives and goals to be placed in specific categories. He felt this would bring about a more accurate assessment of the performance of the learners. Along with a team of researchers and educational psychologists, they worked tirelessly for 16 years. This framework published in 1956, came to be known as Bloom’s Taxonomy. We use this framework in all aspects of our teaching- when we write objectives in our lessons, when we ask questions when we plan our question papers based on different levels.

Let’s understand this with the story of the hare and the tortoise. You know the story, don’t

you? Once upon a time, there was a race between a hare and a tortoise. The tortoise was

slow but continued on his path at a steady pace.

As a teacher, you know that each child is an individual learner, who comes with his/her own distinct style of learning. Reflect and think of the number of times you have had to re-format your teaching style, to cater to the specific needs of your students. In this video, we discuss what the domains of learning are, why they're important and define the stages of each domain that students use to process information and develop skills.

The affective learning domain involves our emotions toward learning and how that develops as we progress from a low order process, such as listening, to a higher order process, like resolving an issue. It is concerned with the feeling that students have of the subject and themselves. The affective domain’ includes the way we deal with things emotionally, such as feelings, values, appreciation, enthusiasm, motivation, and attitudes.’

In the psychomotor domain, students develop physical or manual skills, such as the use of motor skills, coordination, and physical movement. It essentially involves our physicality and how that develops from basic motor skills to intricate performance. Development of these skills requires practice and is measured in terms of speed, precision, distance, procedures, or techniques in execution. Benjamin Bloom himself did not work on the psychomotor domain but research on this domain was done by Simpson and Harrow who built on the work done by Bloom.

Are you excited to learn about how you can develop higher-order thinking in your students? Well, Bloom’s taxonomy is one such framework that explains how you can do this easily in the classroom. As you know Benjamin Bloom and his team created this taxonomy in 1956. In 2001, a team of psychologists, researchers and curriculum developers under the leadership of David Krathwol and Lorin Anderson revised the taxonomy. It was felt that the taxonomy needed to be more adaptive to the current age and suit the needs of current curriculum designers, teachers, and students more effectively than the original Bloom’s one.

Welcome to the video on the six levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. In this video, we will explore each level and understand using examples of how you can assist a student to progress from lower-order thinking to higher-order thinking. The six levels are as follows- Remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating.

Although Bloom’s taxonomy arranges learning into six cognitive levels in order of hierarchy and complexity, it does however, believe in the interdependence of each of these levels, on one another. All levels contribute to the final, holistic learning outcome.

Think for a moment- when did you first hear about Bloom’s taxonomy? Was it when you were getting your education degree or was it when you started planning your lessons? What accounts for this enormous popularity of Bloom’s taxonomy? In this video we will take a look at why we should implement Bloom’s taxonomy in our classrooms.

Bloom’s taxonomy is a powerful tool to help develop learning objectives because it explains

the process of learning.

1> The taxonomy consists of a hierarchy of increasingly complex processes which we

want our students to acquire.

2> Provides the structure for writing learning objectives

3> Bloom’s Taxonomy is frequently used by teachers in writing learning objectives as it

provides a ready-made structure and list of verbs.

Do you relate to this image ? Have you ever been overwhelmed while drawing out a lesson plan? Count the number of times you have got down to framing a lesson plan, brimming with new ideas, new activities and then suddenly stopped, why? Because you realized that it did not cater to all the students in your class. A lot of us have faced these challenges. By now, you have already done an in-depth study of this topic learning what is Bloom’s taxonomy, how you can use it to ask better questions and set your lesson objectives.

Do you relate to this image ? Have you ever been overwhelmed while drawing out a lesson plan? Count the number of times you have got down to framing a lesson plan, brimming with new ideas, new activities and then suddenly stopped, why? Because you realized that it did not cater to all the students in your class. A lot of us have faced these challenges. By now, you have already done an in-depth study of this topic learning what is Bloom’s taxonomy, how you can use it to ask better questions and set your lesson objectives.