Thanking teachers who share what they have learned like Flipping Bloom’s taxonomy from Jennifer Brokofsky Blog

I love teacher's who share new ideas that they have learned and make me think of ways to address new strategies to help my students learning in and out of the classroom. Jennifer Brokofsky's  on her blog, Learning out loud  posted  "Turning Bloom's and My Thinking Upside Down. It is based on her attending a specific session at the Saskatchewan IT Summit. The guest speaker was  Shelly Wright and her session was entitled Rethinking Learning. Shelly was sharing her vision of leaning in an inquiry based, technology enhanced classroom.

During the session Shelly shared her take on the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy. At first I was thinking, not someone else kicking my poor Bloom's Taxonomy in the side, again. However, I was pleasantly please to hear an original idea from a fellow educator that got me  thinking about a new way to look at Bloom's Taxonomy.

Jennifer explained what caught her attention at the session with Shelly,

During the session Shelly shared her take on the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy. She simply stated that it was wrong.  WHAT????…..I have been a big proponent of the taxonomy for a long time and here was a person I respect and admire saying it was wrong.  This powerful and succinct statement gave me pause, made me stop, pay attention and listen for her justification.

Shelly went on to say that our perception has been that we learn by starting with remembering a concept, so that we can understand it.  Then we can apply our learning to new situations, analyze, evaluating and finally at the end use our learning to create.

But what if…What if we started with creating?  What if students could start with creativity and end with the knowledge that emerges from their creations?

I can not help but thank Jennifer for posting her blog address on Twitter and sharing Shelly's session and later my finding Shelly's actual post.

At the end of Jennifer’s post I shared my thoughts about flipping Bloom’s Taxonomy…and how by flipping Bloom's it looked a little like the scientific method.

I was just wondering if anyone else notice that if you flip Blooms Taxonomy…you get a rough approach to the scientific method. The first three parts of the scientific method, Ask a Question, Do Background Research and Construct a Hypothesis all follow under Creating. Test Your Hypothesis by doing an experiment would be Evaluating. Analyze your data would be Analyzing, Draw a Conclusion would be Understanding and Communicate Your Results would be new knowledge ergo adding knew data to your memory.

Thanks again Jennifer and Shelly