Climbing the Pyramid of Bloom’s Taxonomy Through the Writing Process

This post first appeared on EdTech Researcher at Education Week.

I had the privilege of co-writing this post with an amazing team of educators. Shaelynn Farnsworth (@shfarnsworth), serves as a Literacy Consultant at Area Education Agency 267 in Iowa. Phillip Loomis (@TeachLoomis) currently teaches 7th grade English in Bellevue, Nebraska and is a member of #iPadAcademy. Erin Olson (@eolsonteacher), serves as an Instructional Technology Consultant at the Prairie Lakes Area Education Agency in Northwest Iowa.

“How do educators design tasks in which students construct their own knowledge; conceptually demonstrate their understanding through application, analyzation, or interpretations; and elaborately communicate this through the use of coherent language, explicit evidence, while aligned to the initial learning objective?”

This common problem of practice is often discovered through collegial collaboration in which educators reflect on and collaborate to increase student achievement through careful lesson design. Believe it or not, but the simple answer could be “through writing.”

Over the past few weeks, we have been discussing and debating this question – as well as related ones – within the context of examining the writing process through the lens of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Though our conversation began as a result of an article by Granello in 2001, that presented a case for using Bloom’s Taxonomy as a framework to improve the writing of doctoral literature reviews, we questioned what this might look like both in terms of the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (Krathwohl, 2002) as well as in a K-12 environment.

“If we are not asking students to make connections, to synthesize ideas, to draw conclusions…if we are not giving them an opportunity for this, or even examining this through process to creation, why would we think it would magically happen when instructed to write?”

>> Read the rest of the article on EdTech Researcher.

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