Thinking Bloom's and Project-Based Learning

You may have noticed some posters around the place with the title, Thinking Bloom's. These posters were created by our Instructional Leadership Team a few years ago to remind teaching staff about the different levels of complexity in thinking.
Bloom's Taxonomy of Thinking has had some revisions over the years. We use the one that goes from lower to higher in this order:

RECALL
UNDERSTAND
APPLY
ANALYSE
EVALUATE
CREATE

Teachers can support critical thinking skills and skills for lifelong learning by increasing the complexity of thinking needed by students as they work through concepts in classrooms. Project-based learning can often provide the framework for more challenging learning opportunities. Try to find ways to add a challenge into your program that will get students engaged in higher order thinking.

Explicit teaching is very important, but this should be a launching point from which students have an opportunity to be curious and inquire and investigate their learning further and in collaboration with others.

Here is a link to an article and videos of Australian teachers talking about how they implement PBL in their classrooms, both primary and secondary, across a range of learning contexts.

There are many staff in our school who have already taken the plunge into PBL (admittedly some of it through clubs rather than classroom settings). I recommend chatting with them for their insights - Paul Reynolds, Craig Bourne, Phil Gregory, Renee Dowling, Sarah James, Amelia Carpenter.

Kelly Anderson 
Deputy Principal