Here is an embarrassingly low-level pair of questions I asked my students: What was the problem in this story? How was the problem solved? Now, it is technically a sequence of questions. But my students are stuck at the lowest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. I’m going to get the same responses from even my most […]
Differentiation TechniqueChange, Then Explain!
Read The OverviewSynthesize: Make A Change, Explain The Effect
I love the term "Synthesize" from the classic Bloom's Taxonomy, but it can be hard to know exactly what it looks like. My favorite "Synthesize Recipe" is to ask students to make a change to existing content and then explain the effects of that change to me.
Specific Examples of “Change, Then Explain!”
Matching Flowers and Pollinators
How to add a couple of Analyze-level tasks to this Synthesize activity.
Don’t Just Paraphrase A Poem
I asked my students to read a poem. Then they had to: Paraphrase each line of the poem. Write your version next to the original line So, I’m not going to get into the pointlessness of this task. I had a room of the most brilliant 6th graders in town and this is what we […]
Upgrading “Put The Events In Order”
I often see this question on language arts and social studies worksheets: “Put these events in order.” Yes, it’s low-level, but the real problem is that it’s a one-off. Let’s make a sequence of questions about the order of events.
Upgrading A Research Report
So many “research reports” are really just “regurgitation re-writes.” Here’s one way to take a research report to a much more interesting level.
Create A Civilization: The River
Most humans want to live near fresh water, which means that most civilizations settled near a river! Let’s add a river to your students’ civilizations.
Graphic Organizers Are Not Final Products
If you looked around my classrooms, you would have spotted a huge red flag hanging on my walls. No, not a literal red flag! But a major clue that I was limiting my students’ thinking. My walls were covered in students’ graphic organizers. Graphic Organizers Are A Scaffold But now I know that graphic organizers […]
From “Summarize” to “Synthesize”
Even what seems like a low-level “summarize” task can become beautifully high-level when we climb Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Don’t Jump Straight to “Create”!
When we jump from “this kid likes board games” straight to “I’ll have them create a new board game”, we leave out important steps in the creative process and set kids up for disappointment (and end up with a lot of unfinished projects). Here’s how to scaffold a truly creative task.
Remix the Song “Help!”
Students took the classic song, Help!, and rewrote it to be about their collective summers.