2.5 Bloom and Marzano

Marzano’s Research and Bloom’s Taxonomy have had a profound effect on my lesson planning and teaching.  Marzano’s Nine Best Instructional Practices help teachers like me plan effective and engaging lessons.  With Marzano’s the nine practices are: 1. Setting Objectives & Providing Feedback, 2. Reinforcing Effort & Providing Recognition, 3. Cooperative Learning, 4. Cues, Questions, & Advance Organizers, 5. Nonlinguistic Representations, 6. Summarizing & Note-taking, 7. Assigning Homework & Providing Practice, 8. Identifying Similarities & Differences, and 9. Generating and Testing Hypotheses.  I find it helpful to look at a lesson plan and figure out how to rewrite them to include a best practice.  Bloom’s Taxonomy helps me to think about my lesson’s objective and how I am asking the students to learn it.  With Bloom’s, the type of thinking and learning required to complete an assignment is ranked from Lower Order Thinking Skills to Higher Order Thinking Skills.  For example, memorizing facts would be a Lower Order Thinking Skill whereas creative or inventive thinking would be a Higher Order Thinking Skill.  As a gifted teacher, I am required to use HOTS in my plans.  Combining Marzano and Bloom is the ideal that I need to strive to achieve in all my lessons.  I can improve by including technology in my plans to be more effective.  The easiest way to share this information is by sharing lessons at planning meetings.  My team and I use a web-based lesson planning software called Planbookedu.  The most important information that I can share with my teammates is to try to think about the lesson’s objective and consider reworking the plan to include a Best Instructional Practice and HOTS.