UDL and Bloom's 21: What I learned today

Bloom's taxonomy has been "reimagined" and reordered to accomodate effective teaching for the 21st century by Shelly Wright at Powerful Learning Practices. Originally created by Benjamin Bloom and colleagues in the 1950s, Bloom's taxonomy reflected the belief that a hierarchy of skill acquisition exists and that learning must begin with the most rote and simple tasks and be mastered prior to moving up the hierarchy to more cognitively demanding processes.

A subsequent review of Bloom's taxonomy led to Blooms 2.0 with  "creating" replacing "synthesizing" and moving to the top of the hierarchy with "evaluating" settling in just below "creating." 

Bloom's 21 refers to learning in the 21st century, taking what we know from brain research and theoretical underpinnings of universal design for learning and applying them to align Bloom's 2.0 with today's classroom practices.

When reading about Blooms 21, I had a "should've had a V-8 moment." (Hope you are not too young that you don't remember this commercial!) Really! How many times have I told participants in workshops that students with learning disabilities may have trouble remembering but they can certainly analyze and and evaluate and to not hold them back from higher, more challenging levels of thinking just because they stumble on the first "stair step" of processing. How many times have I told workshop participants that the way to help students with disabilities to learn is to give them more depth (increasing the complexity of thinking) rather than breadth ( keeping it simple but giving them more to remember). I wish I had made the natural link to "flipping Bloom's" but kuddos to Shelly.

By starting with creating, we tap students' engagement, action and expression, and representation. While it may not apply to everything that schools require students to learn, viewing teaching from the Bloom's 21 perspective helps us move students from novice to expert learners!

Hop over to Brad Wilson's 21 Innovate blog to see his list of app recommendations for mathematics, reading, storytelling, writing, language arts, social studies, science, and other great apps as they apply to Bloom's taonomy. Then think about how to "flip the pyramid" and put "creating" at the entry point for teaching in order link into the principles of universal design for learning. 

Remember...this is one person's learning ideas related to UDL...one step at a time! See you back here next week.