The question staircase and Bloom’s Taxonomy

It’s nearly a year since I went to Indonesia to talk to some lovely teachers in Padang, West Sumatra about Bloom’s Taxonomy and storytelling. Since then I have tried to implement the learning into other workshops and in particular use a framework to develop thinking skills through questioning.

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Benjamin Bloom was an educational psychologist who developed a taxonomy which included three domains to classify learning objectives. The domain most familiar to language teachers, and the one I will focus on, is the Cognitive Domain. This is also known as the Knowledge-Based domain. The other two domains are the Psychomotor Domain dealing with actions, and the Affective Domain which addresses emotions.

The Cognitive Domain

The Cognitive Domain is best described with a picture and if you google (and I encourage you to do so) ‘Bloom’s Taxonomy’, a picture very similar to one below will be shown.

This domain classifies 6 objectives, and my understanding and study around this are that these objectives move from lower order thinking skills up to higher order thinking skills. At this point it’s important not to think of higher order thinking skills as being more important but just different skills that require a different level of thinking to develop. I would argue that they are possibly harder to develop but in my experience they command less focus and are often overlooked for the more traditional development of the lower order skills. The exception to this is ‘create’. Thankfully I have seen lots of examples of this in coursebooks, and in teaching practice, while observing teachers who try to build thishigher order thinking skill . Teachers generally are creative souls so it’s no wonder that this objective is addressed often.

Definitions and examples

Below are some basic definitions and verbs associated with each of the learning objectives.

I have used Bloom’s Cognitive Domain as a tool to develop higher order thinking skills particularly in reading texts. As I mentioned earlier the lower order skills are often developed first and you can see this in the form of comprehension questions in coursebooks and such like. While this is great to check understanding it is often beneficial to go a bit deeper and explore the development of all the objectives in the taxonomy. Let me show you how I have achieved this in the form of a question staircase.

Question staircase

Below is a question staircase that will help teachers create questions to develop thinking skills through the cognitive domain. This can be used as a framework for developing thinking skills and has served as a very useful tool in my training. Have a look at the diagram and then I will show you how I have adapted this for a primary coursebook text.

As you will see there are more opportunities to ‘create’, the reason for this is while it happens to be at the top of the thinking skills pyramid it is in my opinion one of the easiest to develop activities for. It requires a little amount of planning and only a small amount of imagination. Students have this in abundance so I encourage teachers to be as creative as possible at this stage.

Now let’s have a look at how I have adapted this in practice. I have chosen a familiar story that also introduces a ‘value’.

Academy Stars, Level 4, Macmillan Education

For this story I have used the staircase to help me develop lower order and higher order skills. So let’s start with Remember.

How did the tortoise walk? How did the rabbit hop? Who won the race? Act out the story.

You might think that ‘act out’ is more of a creative task however it is a remember task because to do this effectively all students have to do is recall the story. If you want them to change the story or interpret it in another way then it would be a create task. Now let’s look at understand.

Why was the rabbit happy at the start? Why did the rabbit fall asleep? How did the rabbit win?

You can see we have now moved into the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ and moved away from the ‘whats’, ‘whos’ and ‘wheres’ to really understand the text in a deeper fashion. If any of you has a child or niece or nephew you will have no doubt come to a stage where every questions the child asks is a ‘why’ question and the answer you give is then followed by another why and a so on and on until you end up tearing out your hair. ‘Why’ is a great question to ask to really understand something. Follow it up with ‘how’ and you have two very powerful tools to check understanding. Let’s now look at how we can apply our understanding.

What would you do if you were the rabbit? Would you laugh at the tortoise? How would you feel if you were the rabbit / tortoise?

Apply asks the students to use their understanding in another situation that is personal to them. In these examples they are asked to put themselves into the shoes of the rabbit and then decide whether laughing at someone’s misfortune (or arrogance) is OK. We then look to empathise with the characters, which is an important skill to develop. Another important skill is the ability to analyse, let’s look at this now.

Analysing is about separating information into parts to determine relationships and provide a deeper understanding. Useful tools for this are matching tasks, and even better Venn diagrams. Venn diagrams provide a visual tool of synthesis and analysation and are useful at showing both differences and similarities. See the example below.

Students are asked to put words from the text in the circles above. So for example the word ‘fast’ goes in the rabbit’s circle and the word ‘slow’ in the tortoise’s circle. The word ‘race’ and ‘wood’ go in the middle as this applies to both the rabbit and the tortoise. You can dictate or give out a number of words to check their understanding or have them just add their own from the text and compare with a partner. The more complex the text is, the more circles you can add. Evaluate is the penultimate stage in Bloom’s Cognitive Domain and let’s look at how we can activate this skill.

Which part of the story did you like? Why? Which part of the story didn’t you like? Why? Write a summary of the story. Write out the meaning of the story.

Evaluating is about justifying decisions and thoughts. The important question here (again) is why? It’s not enough to give an opinion at this stage we must say why we feel that way. Children are very good at asking ‘why?’ but not very good at answering ‘why?’ and we as teachers must ask questions and provide task that bring the ‘why?’ out of them.

The final stage and the tip of our pyramid is create. As I mentioned earlier I feel this is one of the easiest for us as teachers to think of a task to do. For this I have chosen the following:

Invent a new ending. Write yourself into the story. Write more of the dialogue between the rabbit and tortoise before the race starts. Write more of the dialogue between the rabbit and tortoise after the race ends. Write the story again but change the animals and the way the race is won. Create a values display highlighting different values from well know stories.

I could go on. As you can see the limits of create are your and the students imagination.

I hope you enjoy using the staircase as a useful tool of thinking and I encourage you to ask the right questions to develop those areas that are often forgotten from our coursebooks and classroom resources. Keep them thinking!

Call to action!

Using the staircase design a series of activities for your class to access all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.