Blogging About Marzano and Bloom

In college, we were taught all about Marzano and Bloom.  I have to admit that I had a difficult time understanding the value behind these strategies because they were a more abstract concept coming out of a college textbook.  I am sure many teachers can agree with me in that what we learned in our college courses had little to no bearing on what we do as teachers today, or at least as far as we are aware.  For many of us, the practice of teaching has made us the teachers that we are today.  Over the years, I began to understand the importance and value of utilizing these strategies to best meet the differing needs of my students. 

Now, I make a conscious effort to include both Bloom’s and Marzano’s into my regular lesson planning. However, now knowing that changes have been made to Bloom’s Taxonomy to reflect new thinking and practices about education I will alter my plans to incorporate those newer strategies.  I already keep copies of the taxonomies and strategies along with the state standards and NETS in my lesson plan book.  It does become rather cumbersome but it is well worth the space and time that it takes to consciously incorporate them into my planning.   

To help facilitate this change in my planning, I would need to create a new type of lesson planning sheet.  I am considering changing my lesson plan format to incorporate a designated spot to list the strategies and standards that I am meeting within each lesson and unit.  This document would need to be a live document on my computer.  I believe that this could be quite a task but it would, in the end, make my planning much more succinct and useable.  This in turn would then benefit the students to a high degree by making their lessons and learning far more interesting and applicable to 21^st century skills.  

My team meets weekly and they enjoy hearing about the wonderful things that I am learning in my Master’s courses.   We, as a school, are working to consciously incorporate Marzano’s strategies into our teaching already and have monthly goals for each of the strategies.  I am not certain as to whether or not my staff and teammates are aware of the updated Bloom’s Taxonomy so this is something that I will definitely share along with web tools that are available to meet each level of the taxonomy.