blooms taxonomyLast month I posted and shared about Lesson Planning. This is another wonderful visual that I came across on my late night ‘surfing’ and thought that it captured Bloom’s Taxonomy really well. You can download it in full size  here. Benjamin Bloom was an educational psychologist who chaired the committee who devised the taxonomy in the 1950s. This outlined a classification of learning objectives. The taxonomy was developed to promote higher forms of thinking in education on order to move away from rote learning. They identified the three domains of learning as cognitive, affective and psychomotor or, as many of us say, heart, head and hand.

The attached visual deals mainly with the cognitive learning domain.  This visual helps us refine our thinking – are we asking students to create or evaluate? Are we hoping that by the end of the lesson or module or programme they will be able to analyse or apply? I hope this will be helpful in your work in preparing lesson plans, course outlines and schemes of work.

If you want to learn more, or refresh your thinking on Bloom’s taxonomy I recommend visiting the following website http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html

Aoife McCormack

County Adult Literacy Organiser