Blogging About Bloom and Marzano

• How will your knowledge about Bloom's taxonomy and Marzano's research affect your lesson planning?

While I learned about Bloom’s taxonomy under its original state, the main idea has remained the same until the addition of new verbs to help implement instructional technology into learning.  As a technology teacher, I’ve been somewhat ahead of the curve in this regard, but there are so many new and useful tools that have come out that even I have been pretty impressed at what is available.  I was introduced to Marzano’s research and strategies about 6 years ago and found that much of what I did already aligned to this model.

• Are you currently implementing these concepts? If so, how could you improve or change them to be more effective? If not, what is your plan to begin implementing them?

When teaching business classes like accounting in the past or digital arts courses like video production today, I’ve always tried to utilize the aspects of Bloom’s taxonomy into my lessons.  Through my learning in courses taken in pursuit of my Master’s Degree in Instructional Technology, I have been more aware of the Digital Bloom’s Taxonomy and have made greater efforts to include these actions into my instruction.

As for Marzano’s nine instructional strategies, I use them, especially selected options.  In my current capacity as a video production instructor, I find utilizing methods to help me student use and become adept with Summarizing and Note-Taking to help them tell their video stories in an efficient manner.  Because of the unique recognition and praise that my students can achieve because of a video they created that was aired on our school news show, I have found that effort has be much easier to come by than when we first started the show. 

As for Homework and Practice, students need to create quite a few videos along the way before becoming the next Steven Spielberg, so creating videos each week for our show gives them ample opportunities to practice their skills.  In my lower level classes of Multimedia, I like to give homework in the form of a video or internet reading to prepare them for the lesson/practice that we will do in class, much in the model of a flipped classroom.

I am able to utilize non-linguistic representation often in a video classroom.  For example, in a lesson about video frames per second, I wanted the students to see what our eyes miss but what can be captured with a high speed camera.  Seeing is believing and also enhances their ability to understand the concept behind frames per second.  Here is an example of a cool non-linguistic representation of high speed filming a golf ball striking a wall:  High Speed Video example .

I like using technology that students will be excited about using and learning.  It makes learning more enjoyable for them and easier to achieve.  Using a mix of Marzano’s nine strategies and the newer digital Bloom’s Taxonomy goes hand in hand in the effort to help today’s students learn.

• How could you share your new information with your colleagues to possibly enhance their teaching practice? What is the most important information you would want to share?

I have been asked to be part of a team to put on professional development session for the start of the next school year.  A large focus will be to help the teachers to implement useful technologies into their classrooms as well as to use them effectively within proper teaching methods.  I plan on focusing on some of Marzano’s strategies as examples of things that teachers can do to take a step in the technological direction. 

I also meet with content area colleagues to share with them some of the strategies I use to get technology into my classroom (as this has become a big push in our district’s teacher evaluations now and many are eager to learn new ideas).   For example, I assisted our art teacher on testing the students understanding of the material (Bloom’s) by having them blog about the subject (digital Bloom’s).  At the same time, the students are practicing Marzano’s strategy of summarizing to be able to create a blog on a topic.

I look forward to this new opportunity to become part of our teacher leadership community and help my colleagues to find out about cool ways to utilize the many great new tools out there.