Last week I wrote a post about hands-on learning, and how what seemed like a rich experience–launching rockets–might not be so useful if students didn’t know what they were looking at. On the other hand if students had been primed with knowledge beforehand they could observe relevant things and increase their knowledge by adding detail to…
We’ve had a series of great conversations this year with out colleague Steve Chiger, Director of 5-12 Literacy at Uncommon Schools. Topic: Knowledge and how to infuse more of it, more successfully into English lessons. One of the challenges of knowledge of course is that all knowledge is not equal. Some things are more important than…
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the uses and mis-uses of Bloom’s Taxonomy, that trusted framework of teaching referenced by just about every teacher on god’s green earth. Briefly, people see the pyramid and they think- “Oh, more rigorous is higher up… I should ask all “higher order questions.” I should avoid being…
It’s hard to find a teacher who doesn’t make reference to Bloom’s Taxonomy. It’s part of the language of teaching. For those who aren’t familiar with it here’s some background from Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching: In 1956, Benjamin Bloom … published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Familiarly known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, this framework…
Recently I posted on Twitter a picture a friend had sent me of work a young student did in the classroom. The post went a little viral (or as viral as something can in my tiny corner of the universe) and people seemed to interpret it in different ways. I thought I’d write a quick post…