Blogging about Bloom and Marzano

When I keep Bloom’s and Marzano in mind during my lesson planning, it drives my instruction in a direction of critical thinking. Without them, it is very easy to slip into the busy work or textbook work that is only memorizing information. Keeping the Marzano strategies and levels of Bloom’s in mind helps me focus my instruction on skills that are more important.

Any competent teacher will be implementing some of Bloom’s or Marzano’s in their instruction without even trying. However, keeping them in mind is what creates master teachers. When I am planning, I usually have them on the back burner, so to speak. But I know that planning with those purposefully will make me a better educator. In terms of Digital Bloom’s, In my classroom, I currently do a lot of Creating projects, but I also do a lot of Remembering book work and worksheets. So I need to try and shift away from all the lower level thinking skills and try to be intentional about the higher level thinking skills. I will try to eliminate textbook lessons in social studies and replace them with hands on activities. I think with Marzano’s strategies, I do a little of each of them. But as I study them further I am coming up with new and exciting things to try. For example, I love the idea of creating analogies in the strategy of identifying similarities and differences. I can definitely use those in math when we are studying geometry.

Creating professional development for other teachers at my school is something that I am passionate about. I love to help, especially where technology and higher order thinking skills are concerned. Ideally, I would host a professional development session for my whole staff over Bloom’s and Marzano. I would want to present them with an overview of both to give them an idea of how the strategies could work and how they could help them in their classrooms. Most teachers just need help dipping their toes in, and once they are somewhat familiar they jump in on their own and at their own pace. More likely, I could send out a few emails with pieces of the information. Or I could have just a few minutes at a staff meeting to introduce the strategies and then follow up with the different grade level teams. I also could discuss the Bloom’s and Marzano’s strategies with the teacher technology team. There is one teacher from each grade level on that team. Then, those teachers could go back and give the information to their teammates. That would be a very efficient delivery of the information.