Blooms and Marzano

Before this week, I have used Blooms significantly in my classroom. I made it a point to put it on my wall next to my standards in addition to putting one on the wall for my students to use. When I have students design their own assignments, I ask them to reflect on where they are in the unit (or how much content have we covered and is the information they are using in their project new or old content) and challenge them to lift their assignment to the next levels. I feel that using Blooms challenges me to make sure I am going through each step as well reaching the upper levels of Blooms to increase critical thinking. This past year I worked to align my FCS standards with Common Core. As I wrote my objectives, I found that the verbs in the FCS standards were too specific to higher levels of learning. I found that if I started with the lower levels and then built throughout the week, I had better test scores.

However, I was not using the Digital form of Blooms. I really like that they have provided more ideas to move student into the high levels of thinking. Having and using this tool will allow me to defend my use of blogs, wikis and other online tools with more concrete evidence. It also gives me several ideas of when to incorporate particular assignments as we move through the content and the depth of the assignments.

Up until this week I was not as familiar with Marzano. I have found through others blogs and posts some great resources and believe the use of each of the nine techniques will really help me diversify my teaching techniques. As I move into a higher preforming school, I am excited to be able to have student’s blog as homework. Up until this term, I have not been a big advocate for homework from FCS. But, I think a reflective or research based blog will be a good place to start. I am also going back to teaching Culinary Labs, which I have not done this past year. I invasion my lab room much like a science lab, thus the process of hypothesizing, testing and retesting is going to become important. There were a few parts of Marzano’s theory that we do as FCS teachers naturally. Collaborative teaching (because of labs) is essential. I am going to have to focus on using intentionally grouping in my Financial Literacy class more than in my Culinary Arts class or in Student Council.

I always use Blooms when writing my daily objectives and my unit objectives. I think I will also put up Marzano next too Blooms to help give me addition ideas to reach the levels of Blooms