Bloom's Taxonomy and Webbing
Write Right – Adding a Contextual Framework to Pre-writing
In this article, bright, advanced or gifted and talented students learn to add meaning to the way they develop webs using Bloom's Taxonomy in this advanced method.
And the teacher continued. “Well, that’s a good first step. You have made a really nice web with a hub and layers, or rings of details that support and illustrate the topic. You have plugged some of these words into your topic sentences and have a strong outline for writing an essay. That’s all very nice, but what does it mean to you?”
In the continuing Write Right series of articles, innovative brain-based ideas will be explored that can help bright, advanced or gifted and talented students gain some fresh perspectives by using higher-order thinking skills and abstract thinking on how to write in multiple styles and genres – including expository essays, narratives, creative, poetry, persuasive, literary analysis, cause and effect and many others.
Making Learning Sticky
In terms of current brain research, almost all of the studies on education these days indicate that the human mind can best encode and process information when the new learning is connected with things that already have meaning to the learner. What this indicates is that when the brain has a contextual framework for associating new information with older memories, students have a higher chance for encoding, retaining, and eventual decoding of the new material. In other words, things need to be “sticky” for students to best use them. Things that are sticky to a human brain are things that have meaning or value to that person; however, meaning and value are different for each person due to different histories, likes and dislikes.
The objective for the teacher then is to find things for bright, advanced or gifted and talented students to write about that have meaning and value for each student - and this is where the obvious problem arises. There is no way that a teacher can compose any assignment that has the same relevance for every student in the class. However, that is where adding a cognitive contextual framework by introducing Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of understanding into the pre-writing activities can pay huge dividends.
Bloom's Taxonomy
Teachers can add greater meaning to their writing assignments by understanding the students’ learning styles and differentiating the levels of descriptive words along Bloom’s Taxonomy they use in the rings around the topic hub. This can be accomplished by a skillful teacher who knows the students well enough to be able to assess the skills and knowledge the individual students have entering the assignment. Students with better-developed backgrounds should be encouraged to attempt to use the words and concepts more advanced in the hierarchy.
Students can insert descriptive words into the rings beginning with Bloom’s Knowledge level, where they basically remember or explain an object's critical attributes such as the facts and details about the topic. Further along Bloom’s Taxonomy is the Comprehension level where students can understand, explain and organize their conceptions of the topic. Still further along the taxonomy is the Application level where students can relate details about the topic to address other new issues and topics. At the Analysis level, students can break the topic down into smaller components to perform operations such as comparing and contrasting the details. Finally, at the Synthesis level students can make practical and value judgements about the topic.
Once the students have webbed their sticky words at the appropriate level of meaning to each, they then take the topic hub and all the words webbed to it to use them as key words for their topic sentences for the paper they are about to write. By using this method, students with different strengths and different needs can all tackle the assignment based on their individual levels of readiness.
While Anderson and Krathwohl have updated Bloom’s early pioneering research in 2001, his Taxonomy is still a magnificent resource tool for teachers to use in differentiating instruction!
