CHAPTER 6

IMPLEMENTING A CURRICULUM DAILY IN THE CLASSROOM

I. Learning Styles

We all experience the world in unique ways, and with that comes variation in the ways we learn best.
Understanding these different types of learning styles can drastically impact the way teachers handle their
students, set up group projects and adapt individual learning. Without understanding and acknowledging these
different ways of learning, teachers might end up with a handful of students lagging behind their classmates—in
part because their unique learning style hasn’t been activated.

Part of your responsibility as an educator is to adjust your lessons to the unique group of students you
are working with at any given time. The best teachers can cater to each student’s strengths, ensuring they are
truly grasping the information.

A. Four Learning Styles

1. Visual learners:
 Someone with a preference for visual learning is
partial to seeing and observing things, including
pictures, diagrams, written directions and more.
 Students who learn through sight understand
information better when it’s presented in a visual way.
 These are your doodling students, your list makers and
your students who take notes.

How to cater to visual learners:

 Give students opportunities to draw pictures and diagrams on the board, or ask students to
doodle examples based on the topic they’re learning.
 Make handouts and use presentations.
 Visual learners may also need more time to process material, as they observe the visual cues
before them.

2. Auditory learners
 Auditory learners tend to learn better when the subject
matter is reinforced by sound.
 These students would much rather listen to a lecture
than read written notes, and they often use their own
voices to reinforce new concepts and ideas.
 These types of learners prefer reading out loud to
themselves.
 They aren’t afraid to speak up in class and are great
at verbally explaining things.
 Additionally, they may be slower at reading and may often repeat things a teacher tells them.

How to cater to auditory learners:

 Get your auditory learners involved in the lecture by asking them to repeat new concepts back
to you.
 Ask questions and let them answer.
 Invoke group discussions so your auditory and verbal processors can properly take in and
understand the information they’re being presented with.
 Watching videos and using music or audiotapes are also helpful ways of learning for this group.
 3. Kinesthetic learners
 Kinesthetic learners, sometimes called tactile
learners, learn through experiencing or doing
things.
 They like to get involved by acting out events or using
their hands to touch and handle in order to
understand concepts.
 These types of learners might struggle to sit still and
often excel at sports or like to dance.
 They may need to take more frequent breaks when studying.

How to cater to auditory learners:

 Instruct students to act out a certain scene from a book or a lesson you’re teaching.
 Also try encouraging these students by incorporating movement into lessons: pacing to help
memorize, learning games that involve moving around the classroom or having students write
on the whiteboard as part of an activity.

4. Reading/writing learners
 According to the VARK Modalities theory developed by
Fleming and Mills in 1992, reading/writing learners prefer to
learn through written words.
 These types of learners are drawn to expression through
writing, reading articles or books, writing in diaries, looking up
words in the dictionary and searching the internet for just about
everything.

How to cater to auditory learners:

 Of the four learning styles, this is probably the easiest to cater to since much of the traditional
educational system tends to center on writing essays, doing research and reading books.
 Be mindful about allowing plenty of time for these students to absorb information through the
written word, and give them opportunities to get their ideas out on paper as well.

Embrace all types of learning

Understanding these different learning styles doesn’t end in the classroom. By equipping students with
tools in their early years, teachers are empowering them for their futures. Pinpointing how a child learns best
can dramatically affect their ability to connect with the topics you’re teaching, as well as how they participate with
the rest of the class.

II. Bloom’s Taxonomy

A. Background Information

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom with collaborators Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David
Krathwohl published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational
Objectives. Familiarly known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, this framework has been applied by generations of
K-12 teachers and college instructors in their teaching.

The framework elaborated by Bloom and his collaborators consisted of six major categories:
Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The categories after
Knowledge were presented as “skills and abilities,” with the understanding that knowledge was the
necessary precondition for putting these skills and abilities into practice.

While each category contained subcategories, all lying along a continuum from simple to complex
and concrete to abstract, the taxonomy is popularly remembered according to the six main categories.

B. The Original Taxonomy (1956)

 Knowledge “involves the recall of specifics and universals, the recall of methods and processes, or the
recall of a pattern, structure, or setting.”
 Comprehension “refers to a type of understanding or apprehension such that the individual knows what
is being communicated and can make use of the material or idea being communicated without necessarily
relating it to other material or seeing its fullest implications.”
 Application refers to the “use of abstractions in particular and concrete situations.”
 Analysis represents the “breakdown of a communication into its constituent elements or parts such that
the relative hierarchy of ideas is made clear and/or the relations between ideas expressed are made
explicit.”
 Synthesis involves the “putting together of elements and parts so as to form a whole.”
 Evaluation engenders “judgments about the value of material and methods for given purposes.”

C. The Revised Taxonomy (2001)

A group of cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists and instructional researchers, and testing and
assessment specialists published in 2001 a revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy with the title A Taxonomy for
Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. This title draws attention away from the somewhat static notion of
“educational objectives” (in Bloom’s original title) and points to a more dynamic conception of classification.

The authors of the revised taxonomy underscore this dynamism, using verbs and gerunds to label their
categories and subcategories (rather than the nouns of the original taxonomy). These “action words” describe
the cognitive processes by which thinkers encounter and work with knowledge:

Remember Analyze
 Recognizing  Differentiating
 Recalling  Organizing
Understand  Attributing
 Interpreting Evaluate
 Exemplifying  Checking
 Classifying  Critiquing
 Summarizing Create
 Inferring  Generating
 Comparing  Planning
 Explaining  Producing
Apply
 Executing
 Implementing
 D. Bloom’s Taxonomy Levels

1. Remember
This stage of learning is about memorizing basic facts, dates, events, persons, places, concepts and patterns.
At this level, educators might ask learners simple questions like:
 What are the most spoken languages of Latin America?
 What is the chemical formula of water?
 Who was the first president of the United States?
The associated cognitive processes, as already noted, are:
 Recognizing means locating knowledge in long-term memory related to presented material (e.g.,
recognizing the dates of important historical events).
 Recalling is retrieving knowledge from long-term memory (e.g., recalling the dates of important
historical events).
2. Understand
At this point, learners might be asked to explain a concept in their own words, describe a mathematical graph
or clarify a metaphor.
The processes associated with understanding are:
 Interpreting implies changing from one form of representation to another. It might be transforming
numerical information into verbal.
 Exemplifying is finding a specific illustration of a concept or principle. It may be giving several
examples of Suprematist paintings.
 Classifying is determining a category of something. An example is the classification of mental
disorders.
 Summarizing means retrieving a general theme of significant points (e.g., writing a short summary of a
story).
 Inferring is drawing a logical conclusion from given information. It may be formulating grammatical
principles of a foreign language from the presented examples.
 Comparing is finding correspondences between two ideas or objects (e.g., comparing historical events
to their contemporary analogues).
 Explaining is constructing a cause-and-effect model of a system, for example, explaining the causes of
the French Revolution.
3. Apply
Now, it’s time to use learned facts and abstractions in new contexts and particular situations.
For example, students might be asked to discuss phenomena described in one scientific paper using terms
and concepts of another paper.
The processes of cognition corresponding to this stage are:
 Executing is applying a procedure to a familiar task (e.g., calculating the root of a number).
 Implementing is about applying a procedure to an unfamiliar task (e.g., using Newton’s Second Law in
a new situation).
4. Analyze
At this level, students are supposed to break down concepts and examine their relationships.
For instance, they might be asked to recognize the genre of a painting or describe the leading causes of the
Great Depression.
The three particular processes associated with this stage are:
 Differentiating means distinguishing important from unimportant parts of presented material (e.g.,
distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant numbers in a mathematical word problem).
 Organizing involves identifying how elements fit or function within a structure (e.g., finding the
hypothesis, method, data and conclusion in a research report).
  Attributing means determining a point of view, bias, values, or intent underlying presented material. An
example would be to identify the author’s point of view of an essay.
5. Evaluate
In this stage, learners are expected to use their knowledge and skills to appraise a situation, justify their stand
or criticize others’ opinions. They should be able to point out logical fallacies in arguments or compare a work
to the highest standards in its field.
They might be asked, for example:
 In your opinion, is online piracy ethical?
 Do you consider jazz music to be high art?
 What are the most absurd arguments against vegetarianism?
Evaluating is divided into checking and critiquing.
 Checking means detecting inconsistencies or fallacies in a process or product. For example, it’s
determining if a scientist’s conclusions follow from observed data.
 Critiquing involves finding inconsistencies between a product and external criteria. For instance, it’s
judging which of two methods is the best for solving a problem.
6. Create
This is the most complex stage of the learning process and the top of the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy.
At this level, learners combine known patterns, ideas and facts to create original work or formulate their
solution to a problem.
They might be asked to compose a song, rewrite a story in another setting or formulate a hypothesis and
propose a way of testing it.
The three associated cognitive processes are:
 Generating involves coming up with alternative hypotheses based on criteria. An example might be
devising multiple solutions for a social problem.
 Planning is about coming up with a procedure for completing a task (e.g., preparing an outline of an
article).
 Producing means inventing a product (e.g., writing a short story that takes place during the American
Revolution).
E. Importance of Bloom’s Taxonomy
 Bloom’s Taxonomy can help educators map learning within a single lesson or even a whole
course.
 By setting achievable objectives for learners, instructors make them more active and
responsible for their education.
 Bloom’s taxonomy allows educators to gauge the learners’ progress. It helps teachers
determine which level every learner is on and assign them an individual task.

F. Bloom’s Taxonomy Verbs