Brenda A Dyck is a teacher in Calgary and a member of the MiddleWeb Listserv.
She posted this message on 03/01/02.
Knowing about Bloom's Taxonomy is one thing. Implementing it in the classroom
is a totally different thing. Once in a while I stumble on an "Up the
Ladder" activity.
It happened this week.
I was approached by an Israeli teacher this week concerning my "We
the Children..." classroom telelcollaborative project. He wants
to have his Grade 6 students do the project and correspond with my Grade
6/7 students along the way.
My kids (and I!) are excited! International participation adds a dimension
to project work that is stimulating. Many questions crossed their minds
-- would they need to have a special computer program to handle the Hebrew
characters? How would they deal with students for whom English is a second
language? And my one Jewish student wondered if he could try his novice
Hebrew out on them... Lots to consider.
I decided that these kids needed to have some background information on
life in Israel. The students spent one period looking through the Net for
information-rich sites on Isreal.
From here I decided to use a Filamentality "Sampler"
http://www.filamentality.com/wired/fil/index.html
...which provides a template for students to drop their URLs in. From here
students had to devise two questions per website. The answers to their questions
had to found on that link.
I discovered that this group of gifted/talented students had never heard
of Bloom's Taxonomy and had little idea of what I meant when I said they
had to make use of higher level thinking questions.
I directed them to a site that identifiied "Bloom's Verbs":
http://www.edgate.com/d.pl?url=http://www.teachervision.com/lesson-plans/lesson-2172.html
and they set to work creating questions based on as many Synthesis, Analysis,
Evaluation verbs as possible.
Many had trouble seeing that "Would you rather live in Tel Aviv or
Los Angeles?" was a bottomline question, one that only required a one
word answer and little or no thinking.
Little by little I observed them starting to "get it." I have
to say this morning I saw some of the best questions I've seen in a long
time. I know how hard it is to create questions in the upper level of Blooms
and here I was discussing such things with 12-13 year olds. It was a great
time of thinking and thinking about thinking.
If you're interested, heres one of the Internet Samplers on Israel:
http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/pages/samisraelst3.html
I told them they'd make great test writers!
Next week they will trade Samplers and then "do them"! -
Brenda Dyck
ABC Charter Public School
Calgary, Alberta, Canada