Blooms Taxonomy

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a useful strategy that is able to be adapted into any classroom, regardless of the age of the children. It first piqued my interest, during a science lecture where I encountered it for the first time. I had never heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy prior to this, and I found that it made a lot of sense and fascinated me. This prompted me to look into it further and find out more about how to use it in the classroom. After looking into Bloom’s further, I began to realise that it had immense educational value and was seemingly often overlooked by a large majority of schools. During all of my placements a common occurrence when asking a question, was the children either giving an immediate answer, or the children would simply dismiss

The main limitation was the unfamiliarity with high-level questions. As laid out above, very often the children would simply dismiss a question without much thought if they didn’t immediately know an answer. I believe that if Bloom’s Taxonomy and high-level questions were a part of the everyday running of the classroom, the children would meet these challenging questions and be able to give a coherent answer. I feel that the children would better understand how to approach questions if Bloom’s Taxonomy is introduced at the beginning of the school year and used in every aspect of the children’s learning. A second limitation was that not all the children engaged in the challenges and it was always the same children who did and didn’t the challenges. This seemed to be a recurring problem every time challenges were set. This would be something that, as a class teacher, I would aim to resolve. The final limitation I identified was the use of pre-planned questions. I believe that it was best to use pre-planned questions to enable the other adults in the class room to be involved confidently. However, using pre-planned questions left no room for adaptability. It would be preferable for all the staff within the classroom to have a good understanding of Bloom’s Taxonomy and how to ask high-level questions. If Bloom’s Taxonomy had been introduced early in the school year, all the

It has both confirmed and challenged my thoughts on Bloom’s Taxonomy and high-level questioning. One of my thoughts going into school that was challenged was ability expectations. I realised, when working with different children, that ability levels do not correlate to thinking skills. I went into this study with popular expectations of higher-level children will be able to use higher thinking skills than lower-level children. However, as stated earlier this was not evident anywhere in the study. In fact, often the higher-level children were more reluctant to answer questions, possibly in fear of giving a wrong answer. The lower-level children were just as able, and some even more so. I believe this is a reason why an ability grouped classroom is not necessarily the best thing for children. Children should not be grouped according to ability levels, because ability groups can never be entirely accurate, and children should not be given labels which lead to presumptions. As I found out in this study presumptions are often