Blogging About Marzano and Bloom

       Both Bloom and Marzano clearly have had a huge effect on the way teachers teach and the way students learn.  Research shows that when implementing these strategies, student achievement increases, and of course this is the ultimate goal of every teacher.  My ever increasing knowledge about Bloom’s taxonomy and Marzano’s research affect my lesson planning daily.  My increased knowledge and understanding helps me create rich, powerful lessons that students learn from and gain knowledge.  I have been exposed to Bloom and Marzano since starting my undergrad in 2002, but it always surprises me how much I continue to learn and grow as I revisit these strategies over and over (what was that about needing to practice a skill 24 times before mastery occurs?).  I am currently taking two courses at Regis (the other one is a leadership course) where we are reviewing Marzano’s instructional strategies which tells me how relevant and important it must be.  I think that after this summer, I will have spent so much time with these strategies, that I will think about them before every lesson I plan next year.  I want to do a better job than I did last year at increasing student achievement and I think that Bloom and Marzano can help.

     As I stated before, I am definitely currently implementing many of these concepts, but I think, scratch that…I know that I can do an even better job.  After reviewing Marzano’s nine instructional strategies, I realized that I use more of them than I would have guessed and that there are some I am stronger at and some that I still need work implementing.  I did find out that I am pretty good at using nonlinguistic representations in my classroom; I do this regularly and will continue to do so now that I am aware of the research behind it.  One thing I need to work on is homework and practice as well as timely feedback.  I think that with the integration of technology and the comment feature, some forms of feedback will become quicker and easier.  Something else I worked on this past year was cooperation.  I created an atmosphere where cooperation was a part of everyday learning.  However, this was new to me and I found some strategies that worked really well and some days I really struggled with making this type of learning meaningful.  I am going to continue to try next year and learn from mistakes I made this year so that the cooperative learning taking place is even more valuable to the students.  The last thing I need to work on is integrating technology.  I am becoming aware of the power of wikis and blogs and am now feeling open and ready to implement them into my classroom.  This will immerse my students in the technology that they have grown up with, make things easy and efficient, and address the 21^st Century skills that are so important today.

     I am starting on a new teaching team next year and am excited to share my knowledge with my colleagues.  We meet on a daily basis for RTI, best practices, and planning so this is a perfect time to discuss Marzano and Bloom.  I plan on implementing these strategies and concepts in my classroom and reporting to my teammates what works really well and hopefully having suggestions for things they are struggling with or just give ideas on how to integrate technology better.  I am also attending a couple of technology trainings before the school year starts, so I hope to become more knowledgeable about the technology available to me through the school district and sharing back to my colleagues.  We are a very collaborative bunch of teachers, and I think there will be no problem sharing ideas.  I can hardly wait!