Reflecting on a Lesson Using Revised and Digital Blooms Taxonomy

A lesson that I have taught that integrates the Revised Bloom’s and Digital Blooms is a lesson on figurative language and poetic devices.  My students viewed a video from YouTube. The video consisted of different music video clips that portrayed examples of figurative language such as metaphors, similes, alliteration, personification, and imagery. The definitions of each of these poetic devices were given before the music video started playing. Throughout each video clip, the lyrics from the video were written at the bottom of the video highlighting the exact type of figurative language. The students identified the types of figurative language as they took notes and analyzed the different music videos.

My students were really engaged throughout this lesson, because they could easily relate. The music video clips that were shown were of modern-day pop culture music. My lesson could be improved to integrate the higher levels of Blooms Taxonomy as well as Digital Blooms taxonomy by moving the students from the lower order thinking skill of identifying and analyzing to evaluating and creating. My students could bring in a copy of appropriate song lyrics and evaluate the lyrics for meaning and poetic devices. They could find their lyrics online and post their evaluations to a blog.  The students could also create their own song lyrics by writing an extended metaphor. Within their song lyrics they would add descriptive imagery that could include personification.

Another way that I could take my lesson and have the students use higher order thinking skills is by having them complete a project in a wiki host. I have created a wiki at wikispace.com and invited my advanced class to join. I have posted a discussion question for the class to respond to. They are supposed to comment to the discussion post that I made by explaining an example of figurative language that they see out in the “real-world.” For example, they could identify examples on billboards, commercials, signs, menus, and pamphlets, the radio (including music), etc. Once they have done that, they must comment on what one of their classmates identified in the post.

When I think about Bloom’s Taxonomy, the verbs should be applied to what the students are doing, not what the teacher is doing with the lesson. The teacher should take on a diverse roll moving the students through the different levels of thinking with an emphasis on higher-order thinking.  Teachers should decrease, but not eliminate teacher-directed instruction and increase cooperative collaborative activities.