What is Bloom’s Taxonomy in about 300 words?
First, what the heck is a Taxonomy? It’s a system for organizing similar things into groups. (If you didn’t know what Taxonomy was, join the club. I just looked in the dictionary.)
And Bloom’s Taxonomy? A really smart guy named Benjamin Bloom researched and developed a classification of learning objectives. Basically, he mapped out how people learn from LOTS to HOTS. LOTS = Lower Order Thinking Skills to Higher Order Thinking Skills.
From what I’m understanding: LOTS = just that. Lower order. Not as effective or enduring as HOTS. But each stage does (or should) play an important part in the process of learning. Here’s a visual from the Educational Origami wiki about Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS)
- Remembering - Recognising, listing, describing, identifying, retrieving, naming, locating, finding
- Understanding - Interpreting, Summarising, inferring, paraphrasing, classifying, comparing, explaining, exemplifying
- Applying - Implementing, carrying out, using, executing
- Analysing - Comparing, organising, deconstructing, Attributing, outlining, finding, structuring, integrating
- Evaluating - Checking, hypothesising, critiquing, Experimenting, judging, testing, Detecting, Monitoring
- Creating - designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising, making
Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (Text version, also from the wiki.)
Who cares? Look at the text version of the Taxonomy. Where do your lessons live most of the time? After careful inspection, I am pretty sure that the majority of my lessons tend to hang out in LOTS land. That means I can and should be pushing for HOTSer lesson development.
What I noticed for futre lesson planning: Did you catch those new verbs? Applying - Implementing, carrying out, using, executing – could the verbs in red be part of your lesson plan objective statements? I know that most of my objective statement verbs wind up in the ‘remembering’ and ‘understanding’ categories.
I can already see that developing ‘hotter’ lessons will require a foray into the unexplored!
Would you join me in exploring? Do your lessons tend to be LOTS or HOTS?
Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography
