Blogging about Bloom and Marzano

Bloom’s taxonomy has always been a part of my teaching experience. When I originally took my teacher education classes from Regis University back in 2003, Bloom’s Taxonomy felt like it was the new “buzz” word. We were given a copy of the pyramid and studied the verbs associated with it. Then, once I started teaching in 2006, it wasn’t brought up or focused on as much.  I still used it because I really felt like it helped me differentiate my lessons and scaffold them.  Then in about 2010, I noticed that the principals started referring to Bloom’s again, this time requiring that we incorporate the different levels of Bloom’s in our lesson plans.  Luckily I had been doing this, so it wasn’t too difficult to change my ways. I did however discover that I was doing a lousy job pushing my students to the top three tiers of Bloom’s: analyze, evaluate, and create. It was only during this class that I had even heard of Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. I am so excited to start finding ways that I can incorporate this Taxonomy into my lesson plans. I do believe that is a scaffolding approach that I will need to use when technology is involved since students have varying degrees of comfort levels when it comes to technology. For example for the analyzing level, I could teach my students how to use Survey Monkey to create a math survey, then use the results to create a graph using the Create a Graph website from Kid’s Zone. For evaluating, I could get each one of my students signed up on Kid’s Blog and contribute to discussions that way. For Creating (my favorite level!) I would like to continue to use Glogster with my students, but I would also like to try some of the other creative programs such as iMovie and one of the comic book creator websites.

As far as Marzano’s instructional strategies, I never studied them as much as I have for my Instructional Technology courses. I have found that there are a lot of the strategies that I have already used, but reading Marzano’s book has opened my eyes as to other tips and suggestions that are more indepth.  For example, under the Homework and Practice chapter, I have always been a firm believer in not giving homework for just busy work, but to enhance and practice skills that have already been taught. However, I have had a difficult time trying to figure out how to grade my students’ homework and what type of grades to give them.  My colleagues and I have always given academic grades for homework, but I have never felt like that was fair to the students since homework is supposed to be practice. This chapter reinforced my thinking and I will now give non-academic grades, such as for participation or work habits, for homework. From now on, as I am planning my lessons, I will use the attached document to help me plan.

Marzano’s High Yield Strategies Doc

Learning more about Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy, and Marzano’s High Yield Instructional Strategies has brought a new sense of excitement to my teaching. I really believe that I will be a better teacher and be able to reach more students in my class.