Using Bloom's Taxonomy and Higher Order Thinking Skills in Lesson Plans

Bloom's Taxonomy, also called HOTS or Higher Order Thinking Skills, is an educational format for writing questions and designing lessons in which students engage in more than just rote memorization and regurgitation of facts. Here are tips for writing HOTS lessons.

Bloom's Taxonomy has been around for several decades. Higher Order Thinking Skills, also called critical thinking
skills categorizes lesson activities and questions into a pyramid. HOTS are categorized from the top down, in order of skill required and educational value of question type.

Evaluation - Making decisions
Synthesis - Using information in new ways to create new things
Analysis - Identifying components
Application - Using information to solve given problems
Comprehension - Restating, paraphrasing, summarizing
Knowledge - Rote fact recall (These are on the bottom because they are both the most common and least effective)

Bloom's Taxonomy concepts get bandied about in educational dialogue. Teachers talk a great deal about teaching critical thinking skills. Sadly, lesson plans still engage students in too little critical thinking and too many knowledge and comprehension activities.

Here's an example. Our daughter's 7th grade class was reading "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" (from "The Twilight Zone"). Looking over the assigned response activities, what did I see? Fact recall and comprehension multiple choice questions. That's what the majority of lessons involve: fact recall and comprehension worksheets. Good students find over use of knowledge and comprehension activities tedious and insulting. Poor students aren't challenged. They learn to look only for the right answer and not use the material in useful ways. Knowledge and comprehension questions teach to the lowest common denominator. Some knowledge and comprehension questions are necessary and part of learning; 80%-90% is too much.

Higher Order Critical thinking involves interacting with content on a deeper level. Bloom's Taxonomy activities go beyond just making material more interactive, although hands-on lessons do facilitate better learning. Assigning projects rather than paper and pencil worksheets is a great way to engage students. Many projects require nothing more than knowledge and comprehension level thinking.

To incorporate critical thinking activities it's necessary to practice some metacogniton exercises. Metacognition means "thinking about thinking". We need to explore how children think and how we can expand their thinking skills from unilateral "right/wrong" answer driven activities, to 3-D question driven activities. We need to ask open-ended questions that have a multitude of possible answers. We need to assign tasks in which children invent, create, solve, explore, weigh options, utilize, reconfigure, formulate, develop, construct, organize, design, debate and experiment.

There's an old saying, "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten". We can't deplore the state of education or wonder why students are graduating not prepared for college or employment if we keep pumping mindless fact-driven content at students. If we want students to think in new, inventive ways, we must give them opportunities to do so.

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